people are recommending great commercial 3d modellors, but I think what's getting lost here is that Blender isn't some weak/featureless modellor. Blender is a fully-featured 3D program developed originally by a movie studio for in-house use. They later choseto make it open source because they made their money from Movies, not from selling the software they use to make them. If you go for any commercial software, why not also grab Blender for free? And if you can't afford it, why not just use Blender - I know 3d artists who, even though they have Maya and 3DS, still use and prefer Blender because of it's customizability and power. Just because it's given away for free doesn't mean it didn't take thousands of dollars and many professional programmers to make it. Firefox is free, but it's not junk. Seriously, check out blender, I bet you it will do everything you need it to, and more.
Well Blender is really a good choice to get aquinted with 3d rendering and modeling as it's open source which means free. I made some searches for movies that was made by the blender software, not sure if they used some extra plugins though but.... Check out this movie - Big Buck Bunny - http://www.vimeo.com/1084537 Truly amazing work! Here's the Blender homepage http://www.blender.org/ For those interested. There's both a 32-bit and 64-bit versions as well as mac and linux. The 64-bit version is still not fully featured as the 32-bit though but under dev.
Go for 3ds max,I have posted some tutorials for 3ds max on my youtube acc. search my channel:matrixdude01