I am a graphic designer, who has for the majority of my career worked with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (Among other members of the Adobe Suite). Recently I have taken an interest in 3-D Design, creating text in perspective or a street corner for example, all using the perspective grid included in Adobe Illustrator. More recently I've taken on more complex 3-D Designs, such as ones that would require more than one perspective grid, multiple layers and extrusions, etc. Illustrator is generally meant for 2-D Design, which is where I am stuck.
The first thing that comes to mind is a program like AutoCad or the simpler google sketchup, but is this really the best route? I would like to export 3-D models as vectors from a fixed position (like a snapshot) or at the very least a high quality render as an image file. Any recommendations are appreciated.
tl;dr I'm looking for some software to make complex 3-D models, for the purpose of interesting 3-D designs, preferably to export as vectors or high quality images, because Adobe illustrator doesn't handle complex models very well..
