The newest version of Make magazine has an interesting walk-thru of Google’s free 3D drawing application called SketchUp. I’ve been playing around with it a bit this evening (making a virtual workbench) and it’s pretty darn cool. I’m still working on my model, but here’s an example of what someone else did:

You can do similar things on larger scales (ex. full sized buildings), plus there are a lot of pre-built models and materials already out there. Anyone interested in dabbling with 3D models should check it out (unfortunately, it only runs on XP or OSX).