Irrlicht Engine

I like Wings3D a lot since i am a noob at modeling and it's very easy to use.

I like the sound of easy to use, but does it do animations and animations with skeletons? The tools list doesn't show it under the animation section and the website doesn't include animations in the list of features

Buy 3ds max? Noo thanks. I don't have $5000 plus $1000 a year to through around. I used it a lot in uni and I basically concluded each year added nothing meaningful. I didn't have to pay as I had a student version, but although I know how to use it, I want something free.

Hadn't heard of Misfit ...

Thanks for the replies everyone, I'll give blender a shot. I've never used it before though, so first thing will be to find me some tutorials

In the features page of this site it says

"Currently supported mesh file formats:
Animated objects:

B3D files (.b3d, r, skeleton)
Microsoft DirectX (.x, r) (binary & text, skeleton)
Milkshape (.ms3d, r, skeleton)
Quake 3 models (.md3, r, morph)
Quake 2 models (.md2, r, morph)
"
What programs ...