Going off topic a bit here but I think all this stuff is useful and related to use for TG2, especially since a lot of people here may not have fortunes to spend on software.
I'm bogged down in Blender here now but struggling on with open source stuff. This screenshot shows you a few things. Gimp is open on the Cintiq (first monitor is Eizo) and I used it to take the screenshot. You see a render of a model done in Wings3d. The model demos why Wings is great. This took about 30 seconds to create. You can get very organic forms but there is no randomness. That model could be exactly reproduced again with the same procedure. Gimp is single window mode now, in case you tried it before when it wasn't. That's a big improvement. You also see the tabs for images open. Much better.
Obviously you see Blender open here. Notice it now has fancy matcap shaders for the realtime view. That vastly improves viewing of sculpted forms. In this case it's just a cube that has the matcap applied but it seriously enhances the realtime view for sculpting. You also notice the floating window for the node network. You can now create as many separate windows as you want and on Linux this is great because I'm using Xfwm which is part of the XFCE desktop. The Linux windows managers allow you to do things like roll the windows up to just bars and always be in front and such like. The Blender theme is one I've done. The reason I did it was because the default one is poor, especially in the way the title bars for the expandable editing boxes aren't hilighted, making the whole UI just look like a mass of ungrouped gray buttons. I've also discovered that a lot of the terrible interfacing things can be changed. That god awful moving cursor with mouse click crap can be disabled and the mouse and keys are so customisable that you can pretty much make it like other apps. No competition for Wings3d though in the modelling department. Blenders modeling is poor but this version has a few tool improvements that I've noticed. You need to change the key and mouse commands to your own likings since the Blender defaults are unlikely to please you. However, it takes days just to configure Blender to your liking. It's ludicrously complex even in just configuring the UI but at least you can do it.
The Planetside logo that you see was taken into Inkscape with trace bitmap. That's an awesome feature that works really well. Then the svg was loaded into Blender to make it 3D from a path. Wings instantly makes imported svg into 3D polys which is really cool but I found that it doesn't like some svg forms like that complex logo for example.
Gimp and Blender can also play together really nicely to edit textures.
When all this workflow finally arrives at getting useful stuff into TG2, I'm not sure. Blender is going to bog me down for weeks but I'm now an expert at Gimp, Inkscape, Mypaint, Krita and Wings3d. 3D Coat is going to take a bit of time and Blender is going to take ages.
I've also spent a lot of time on 2D stuff.
The point is that a really good setup can be had and all you pay for is the hardware. It's worth donating money to these people as well. I did donate to Ardour project but ditched open source for audio in the end so I don't donate now. These apps work on all operating systems. There is no need to spend a fortune. Better to save that and buy the few apps that need paying for and are worth it like 3D Coat or TG2.
I would say the main issue is that you're laying some groundwork if you do things the way I'm doing because you have to learn a lot and sometimes the info simply isn't available. Archlinux alone took some time but that beats Windows or OSX for this set up any day of the week and I can duplicate the same set up on masses of computers easily if I wanted.
I also have Modo but I'm not sure when I'll use it. It's buggy and I'm waiting to see how that goes on Linux.