If you're thinking big Blender is the most powerful free 3D modeler there is. BUT it takes work to learn and use propperly. It'll put hair on your chest, or if you already have hair on your chest it can pull them out one at a time. I suggest using the many tutorials online for it.
Otherwise I use Anim8or, it's much simpler and fairly powerful. Its main drawback being that it doesn't support any image types with alpha channels (PNG, TGA). You have to do transparencies with separate alpha images which don't translate to NL. And it's texture mapping tool is overly simplistic.
Be sure you're not looking in a mirror before you start pointing fingers.