I use and love Blender. It is total freeware. I do recommend buying either of the two main books, Blender 2.0 guide or Blender book. They're around $50 each, which is a great price compared with $3K, and available at Blender's online store. If you have Max 3, use that. A vertex is a vertex and a face is a face. Modeling objects hasn't changed that much since 3.0 came out. It's also a good idea to UV map the models, which is a task unto itself.