I'm going to TRY to make 3d stuff. No promises, though.
This is just from the first portion of the first tutorial for Blender. Big learning curve just building a 3D snowman.

I've considered Sketchup, but there's no chance of doing animation or anything near-lifelike with that. Blender can actually make VIDEO GAMES! Yeah, I'm years away from that, but it's nice that Blender can do more than outputting jpegs.

I hope to get good enough that I can write a decent tutorial for Blender, because this one doesn't really teach. It just gives step-by-step key commands and actions. "So F5 does what again?" When teaching a program, teach with the menus, because newbies can remember them, and we'll learn the key commands as we gradually learn what the tools actually do. Also, we get familiar with all the options around the menu option.
*is no newbie to computers, but has limited experience with 3d design*