If you have chance to get, 3dsmax or C4D are the programms with most possibilities
I have a program called gMax.
It's a few years old but was based on the 3DSMax of the time but it's free. It would have been updates, but Autodesk decided to stop it and work on Max.
You can still download the last version from turbosquid.com here: http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax
I haven't actually used it yet - I only downloaded it a few days ago and haven't got around to using it. Before then I used sketchup, which is ok because it's easy to use, but it does have its problems.
I'm pretty sure that gmax doesn't have the export support for dae or 3ds. Kinda stupid if u ask me, every 3d software has support for 3ds lol.
I don't want to sound like I am repeating myself but if you want to use free 3d modelling software then the best bet is Blender, it has support for a lot of different file types including 3ds and dae. http://www.blender.org/