What are you doing with ripped models?

[Kosheh]

Rather than make a new topic; I guess I'll just post in here with my question. c

I see a lot of people in this forum with neat modeled avatars (probably their ripped work from games they're hacking) and I kinda have the same idea - like, I wanna make a neato avatar or sig and I don't want to get into super duper modeling and spend $500something on a program that its only use is to pose models :\

having that said, is there any very basic free/shareware program available for just repositioning ripped t-model .obj models into all sorts of zany poses and whatnot?

Or am I going to have to throw down the money for Maya3D or something >: