You see quite a bit of 3D art produced by programs containing canned images – for example, Poser. The better the tools the better the output. I have gotten in trouble criticizing the faces created by poser as having vacuous expressions. (It’s true!) I can spot a Poser girl a mile away.
I need better tools to create art for my website and I went on to Renderosity.com in order to see what the artists there are using. There are some nice poser images and there Blender and Photoshop stuff, but the Bryce images caught my eye. Bryce is generally for doing landscapes. It costs around $80, but I did some research and found that you could download the older version, Bryce 5, for free until September 20.
I got Bryce 5, downloaded the standard stuff (like rocks, water, clouds and sky), and went through one of the tutorials on Renderosity. It is a very nice product. I like it.
I will be fooling with it this weekend to make some stuff. There are dozens of Bryce tutorials on Renderosity and I want to do a few. I expect that I will be buying some textures and shapes for Bryce.
If you are interested in computer art and want to try out 3D rendering, this is a good cheap way to get started.