blender used to be pretty hard to use but it's gotten a lot better and it's very powerful and open source. There are a good number of tutorials for it

I like blender

and if you want to spend a little, there's an avastar add on that simplifies some of the process of bringing it into SL

there are in world classes for blender too. Search Ditko. They are doing a beginner blender series that I sat in on once and it was really good

Its between blender or Maya.

I started with Maya (back when blender's interface was weirder) and I like it, but I can't afford to buy it outright. I ended up switching to Blender just because my Maya student version was going to run out

and now I like Blender just fine