First model made with Cheetah3D

For a while I've been wanting to learn how to do 3D modelling, and after a discouraging start with Blender I decided to give Cheetah3D a go and have found I made much more progress. This is despite the fact there is a lot more in the way of free online tutorials for Blender. I don't want to knock Blender, I'm sure it's lovely when you get to grips with it, but really my experience with it, as a complete beginner, is that it makes 3D modelling appear to be something that's pretty hard to learn. With Cheetah3D, however, having only watched the paid-for tutorials by Andrew Hayworth, and some of the excellent free ones on YouTube by user NoVolume, I found that I could start to play around on my own and actually start to attempt modelling some real objects.

So here is a render of the first non-trivial 3D model I've ever made:

[there's a bigger version here] 

I started this after owning Cheetah3D for about a week. As I say, my only experience is watching some tutorials and messing about ineffectually with Blender for a few weeks. While competent 3D artists will no doubt be able to point out deficiencies, and while there are parts I'm not happy with and would go about differently if I had to do it again, I think it's a pretty decent first effort and shows that it's not that difficult to get started.
So if you're a beginner like me and you are wondering whether it's worth spending money on Cheetah3D when there is a free alternative in the form of Blender, then I'd recommend you go for it, unless of course you have a play with Blender and decide that you like it. Personally, I just find Cheetah3D more intuitive. I found that I could make progress just by choosing likely-sounding tools or options from the menu and playing with them, often with a quick read of the built-in help to clarify what some of the options do. Blender gives the impression that it has a lot of functionality, but doesn't expose it in an intuitive way. Having used Cheetah3D now and made some progress with it, I think I would probably get on better with Blender if I went back to it - I'd have a better idea of what to look for in terms of tools and options, although I think I'll stick with Cheetah3D for now.
It's worth saying that just watching this one video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M63wgHGXEdQ&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PLD12BA4029778A06E

from NoVolume was enough to give me a very good start on my drill, and actually was really inspirational in showing the great results you can get with a few tools and in a short space of time, so thanks to him for posting that!

If anyone cares, the drill is this one:

which I chose mostly because this page:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/t/202511837?productId=202511837&storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&MERCH=REC-_-product-5-_-203358885-_-202511837-_-N#.UfXOvlOru1J

gives a 360 degree view of it, plus a nice big picture of the side view shown above, which was enough to get me some 'blueprint' images and get some kind of a view of the tricky parts. In the event, I only ended up with a nice side view, and a fairly crappy front view as my blueprints, so there are parts where I only had a sketchy idea of what it was supposed to look like and had to improvise, but on the whole it's pretty close.

Fun fact: if you search for images of drills you will see that almost all of them are in the orientation shown above (with the business end on the left and the handle on the right). Why is this? I can only guess it's because we live in a right-handed world and so (subconsciously) there is an expectation that the handle should be on the right. It makes me wonder if in the world of product imaging everyone knows that handheld items should be pictured oriented this way, or if they don't actually give it much thought but have all unconsciously ended up orienting them this way due to their innate right-handed bias.