Hexagon is a decent modeling app, but it's got nothing on Blender. Hexagon's UI is
much friendlier, but Blender is a complete modeling + texturing +animation +rendering suite, and, with my limited experience of Hexagon, I don't think it can do nearly as much as B.
I've also toyed around with Bryce PLE (which is pretty much a free non-commercial version of Bryce Pro). It's...mediocre.
The terrain sculpting tools are great, but its 'Deep Texture Editor' is one of the most convoluted and counter-intuitive material systems I've ever seen.
And although it gives you the option to animate stuff, that same procedural texture system causes some
horrendous texture flickering during animation, unless you use pretty high anti-aliasing, which, in turn, increases rendering times to astronomic scales.
And, like Darius said,
Daz is okay, but you won't be able to do much with it without assets, of which you need to buy them off other creators.
other creators, or GAZ themselves.
And yes, it's a no-strings-attached thing. Bryce Pro and Hexagon are fully commercial programs. DAZ as well, I think.
