"I discovered Blender a few years ago and I can say that I love it and I spend a lot of my time creating scenes and objects with it. Blender is freeware but has the power of the other top commercial 3D apps.Even if it has a slow learning curve, it's interface was designed in a very intelligent way and is very customizable, which allows for a speed modeling process.

 

The power of Blender is that you can create everything that you can imagine - from modeling, texturing and lighting to postprocessing with nodes. Blender has also helped me to create objects for my Vue scenes.

For rendering, I always use the Blender internal render engine because it's very fast and has a high quality. Other artists who want to obtain a high amount of realism in their scenes prefer to render with Yafray or Indigo.

I like very much creating landscape environments, finding good materials and textures for terrains, using both procedurals and composing real textures. Sometimes, for more realism, I work with displacements maps.

Blender has many cool features for modeling. It supports all modeling methods, from subdivision surfaces to nurbs, has a lot of modifiers, as well as advanced modeling with dupliframes and dupliverts, and particles for grass or hair. The mesh can be sculpted, painted, UV Mapped, or rigged.

In the last period of time, I enjoyed creating cartoon scenes. Usually I prefer to use two lights in a scene. I use one sun lamp for the lighting, and another sun to cast the soft shadows. Also, I use Ambient Occlusion for softly amplifying the general light. Ambient Occlusion is the little brother of Global Illumination, it illuminates the objects from all sides and, most importantly, it provides for a good render time.

Another powerful feature in Blender is the animation part, but, unfortunately, I haven't had enough time to learn this. Sometimes I import Poser figures in my scenes because it's very convienient to quickly humanize my scenes. :) Otherwise, I model my own characters and do the rigging (skeleton creation mode) to make them posable.

Blender development is very fast and rich and we must learn new things every day.

For anybody who wants to learn Blender, my advice is to not give up in the first day(s). The Blender community is fantastic, with an answer for any question, and there are a lot of tutorials on the Internet too."