Well, I haven't used Sketchup, but I've seen some of the 3d creations, not bad..
But there's always Blender, but will probably take a bit more "learning" to get into it, but it's FREE, and you can make AWESOME graphics with it, even some companies have made video games using it, just to show that it can be done.
Oh, by the way, there are a LOT of video tutorials on using blender, just google Blender Tutorials and you'll be good to go.
Neil: I downloaded progreSOFT and gave it a try. I'm an old hand with AutoCAD and found that progreSOFT was fundamentally the same thing, at least after a few minutes of doing various constructions. It's probably worth looking into for the hobby community.
progreSOFT sounds cool... I have used blender but personally found it hard to use and just plain annoying... You can make good stuff with most software but sometimes it's rather difficult...