Hi, I'm modeler for a long time, in work I was using 3d Studio max, and Maya, but I wanted to get hands on something OpenSource... I was looking at Blender, but it is great tool for animation, unfortuneatly my work is sub-surface modeling or organic characters - in Blender it was realy hard... when I found OpenSource application called Wings 3D I was realy suprised, creating of models was never so easy - clean interface and nice mechanics gives amazing freedom !! I can surely recomend it, since company I work for went to Wings when I showed them what it can... besides... It is fastest modeling application ever with great Video Tutorials... you can find list of tutorials on Wings Forum... You must see IT!!!
http://www.wings3d.com/
It is hosting on sourceforge and gives full CVS access, it is heavly developed to long awaited version 1.0, now it is 0.98.29a - it will happend preaty soon