For Altium Designer, I have been using the QualECAD 3-D viewer (www.qualecad) plugin to image my pcbs in 3-D, and it's very nice. It places gray boxes over components that have a height attached to them. But it can also use VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) models for more accurate component bodies, if you provide the model file.
I was wondering if anyone could recommend an easy to use, intuitive and inexpensive modeling program that doesn't have a steep learning curve that could be used to build simple models of simple parts (resistors, IC's, etc.) which outputs VRML-format files?