I'd suggest Blender. A lot of people at my engineering school have heard of it (and its reputation for being hard to learn to use) and are very much impressed at my ability to use it. No one has heard of Milkshape at school. I'm not sure about Milkshape's ability to do renderings or anything fancy like that, but my airplane design club assigned me to do the renderings with Blender for anything we make. It's very universal and can get you a lot of good attention in the future.
