weapon making

[Ryu]

I will share my vast pool of knowledge with you on the subject. Ready?

Blender - Tutorials

Gimp - Quite like photoshop, need a .dds plugin for making and editing warband textures.

Go nuts!  :

With some luck Ryu or someone else will pop in with some actual advise. But those are free and commonly used tools for modelling and texturing, you can also find tutorials on the taleworlds forum.

Yup those are very good advices. You can pretty much do anything you need with Blender(modelling, UV unwrapping, sculpting etc.). For Blender tutorials i suggest you to check these sites: http://cgcookie.com/blender/ and http://www.blenderguru.com/  . Also you can make quick searches at vimeo.com for blender tutorials too. I suggest you to do look for tutorials for;
-Lowpoly modelling
-UV Unwraping
-Baking textures
-Texturing(may be for GIMP etc.)

For photo editing i prefer GIMP but this one is a little harder to get used to than photoshop. Another free option is paint.NET(http://www.getpaint.net/), its like a lighter version of photoshop. But you'll need dds, normal map etc. plug-ins for them as Worm said. Good luck .