True enough, I did overstate the weight a little. Even so a sword that size would be heavy and take some effort to swing around.
I like the tech demo a lot. It resembles Castlevania a little bit, which is great since that series is awesome. I can't wait to see it get fleshed out into a full game.
Well done!

Actually Wings3D just has a straightforward implementation of Least-Squares Conformal Maps for its AutoUV feature. Blender indeed supports LSCM's, but defaults to a variant of Angle-Based Flattening called ABF++, which is state-of-the-art as of 2005 (incidentally that research was done by one of my profs ). So Blender is far ahead of Wings3D in this feature set. That said, Wings3D has its virtues. It has great workflow, which may make it more efficient for tasks that do not require the full power of Blender, or for modelling and then exporting to Blender to finish the job.

First of all, that is freaking awesome.

Blender is very powerful and free and awesome. It can do texturing, animation and rendering plenty well enough for the purposes of this kind of art, I would say. In fact it has a built-in 3D game engine which allows you to make very cool little games with your models, a bit like a sort of 3D version of Adobe Flash. It does have a slight learning curve, but there is excellent documentation available, including a very nice printed book (albeit about a slightly older version of Blender, but it is very cheap) if you are so inclined. The community is also very helpful.

Wings3D is excellent at what it does, which is winged-edge modeling. It does not do texturing, animation or rendering very well at all. It has basic UV texturing functionality, which would perhaps be adequate for a simple model of a hundred polygons or so, but it's quite a pain even then compared to Blender (IMHO). I would suggest to use Wings3D as a modeller for its workflow and intuitive interface, and then to export your finished model to Blender, and to texture, animate and render it there.

Milkshape3D is commercial but quite nice. It still does not match the feature set of Blender by a long shot, but it has the advantage of supporting every game file format under the Sun. It has its roots in the early modding community of Quake2 when there was no inexpensive tool available for this purpose. Although it does support UV texturing and basic bones animation, it does so in a clumsy way and does not support rendering at all. I own a copy of the full version, mainly for converting between mesh file formats.

Anim8or is surprisingly powerful for how small it is and for having only a single developer, but it lacks character animation, UV texturing, advanced rendering, sophisticated modeling tools, etc. I found it less attractive an option than the others.

If there is a lot of interest, I could see if I can find the time to throw together a visual tutorial for using Blender to make, texture and animate a simple model like this. I am not much of an artist myself, though. If someone who is would like to collaborate with me on that, perhaps by supplying a model and texture, or granting me permission to use their work in a tutorial, or something, that would be a big help for me. Any takers?