My 3d weapons of choice("if you walk without rhythm, you'll never learn"), are Bryce and Blender for scene setup and rendering. For modeling, I used to use Wings3d pretty exclusively, but I'm starting to get more comfortable with Blender's modeling tools. I sometimes use Bryce for boolean modeling effects, 'cause Blender booleans have issues and Wings says, "What is this, 'booleans,' of which you speak?"

It's really nice to see a section devoted to this.