Free 3d graphics software

Goz posted some 3d greyscale height mapped images the other day and suggested a few admittingly high-end ($$$) 3d modeling software pacakges that would produce such images. I have been poking around and found the following opensource 3d graphics package.

http://blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html

A good tutorial on how to produce the greyscale heightmaps is here:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.p...p_from_a_Plane

I was able to produce the following image using an image of a monkey included with the software.

http://web.umr.edu/~birtj/images/monkey.jpg

At this point I know next-to-nothing about this type of software. But it seems like this package can produce the types of images we need and the price is right.

hello,
i am interested in carving 3d carvings. im trying to figure out how to do this by importing a picture and transferring it to 3d if this is possible.