3dstudiomax or cinema 4d. They can make pretty good abstracts, but I would recomend you learn what all the plugins and different settings can do before you go showing off any work heh.
Cinema 4d has some ok tutorials to get you going, but when it comes to getting to more advanced stuff like modeling, there's nothing really out there, because people don't try and use it for it's real purpose for some reason.
3dstudiomax has more tutorials for more advanced things. and is the program used in most classes when it comes to computer graphic classes heh
My favourite is cinema 4d because of all the plugins I can get.
I've found modo 102 very easy to use and its a small prgram. proably do good abstracts the only problem is that it doesn't render. (unlees you get the latest modo 201 its pretty hard to come by). but modo 102 does do a basic texture.
I'm only running 512 mb ram. but thats the advantage of modo. it will work with a pretty bad computer(really bad 2.4 celeron and a 5200 nvidia graphics card ). ah well.
but i dont use cinema 4d 
Linear Mode
