Creating Models

Blender is a nice free 3D graphics application (modeling, animation, and a lot more)

You can get it from their homepage.

This tutorial has a lot of good information and guides to get started.

Hope this helps.
aeroz

I would hope as time goes on that there will be more models available for free (there are some) as the tools become more common (and somewhat easier to use).
Format conversions often is a significant problem.
Getting animations for the objects is much harder/less likely as there are fewer standards (and its more dependant on the flavor of your rendering system).

Like you I would rather not spend alot of time creating assets (have too many other parts of the game/simulation programming project to do).