3D Rendering and Baking Textures

I hope I am posting in the right forum for this question. I have begun my journey into designing clothing. I have been hearing a lot about baking textures. I have been searching around for a good and free program to do this with. I have come up with I believe too many choices. Does anyone recommend a certain one or know how else to do this process? I believe this is my missing link I am looking for to begin my experience in designing clothes for our world. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you all.

As freebies go, I'd recommend Blender. It is by far the most powerful and full-featured free 3D app in existence.

It's got a steep learning curve, so be prepared to be in it for the long haul. It will be a while before you'll be able to do much with it. There's a lot to learn.

Luckily, Blender is well supported in this forum. So if you've got any questions, there will be lots of good folks here who can help you. For my part, I'm primarily a Maya user, so my knowledge of specific how-to's in Blender is quite limited. I can offer advice on general concepts and such, but for the step-by-step stuff there are plenty of others here who routinely answer Blender questions. I'm sure you'll find them to be of tremendous help.