building proposal educational presentation

Hey all,

I'm a 3rd year building surveying student. Have got to grips with 2D drafting in CAD and made a nice structural arrangement (a construction technology tutorial), general arrangement (for the project) successfully in AutoCAD 2009 with help from forums and their posters here at cad tutor.

We have a module called collaborative project in which we have to propose structural solutions, cladding and i'm not too sure what comes next.

What I do know is that we have a final presentation next year which will most likely cover the building in its entirety (at a educational, not overly comprehensive level).

Now for my question...

I would like to feed all of my groups ideas into a 3D model of our "museum of aviation" and am wondering what would be the best program to do this. A rendered, animated model easily showable on a standard computer without autocad / revit would be ideal. Highlighting key structural elements, details and views in perhaps mpg format or one that windows media player is capable of playing. I understand cad has an action recorder and am yet to heed michaels advice and exercise but have seen rendered images from Revit in last years collaborative project and would like to take that further.

Showing a walk through of a the building, from a visitors perspective would lay our presentation at the very top.

If anyone has seen some of the terracotta cladding animations showing the cladding system built element by element this is the effect i would also like to achieve.

3D modelling I am totally new to; however, we have several months before the presentation and I am keen to learn the program for this effect.

Any advice would be much appreciated, this may seem like a dummy question but i am yet fully conversant in either autocad or revit; however, with autocad i am at least some of the way there!

Thanks in advance

Freddie