Well you can get 3ds max from here
www.discreet.com you might need to visit your bank manager first though. There's a nice freebie modeller called G-Max made by the same people, unfortunatly this program doesn't allow you to save in a format that the lod editor can read so this info is of little use

unless someone has a developer version of G-Max, you have to pay for this one. The developer version can save in 3ds format.
What would be great would be for one of the programmers that knows the lod structure to write a plugin for g-max, all this would need to do would be to save to a lod, then the lod editor can take over to do the structureing etc.
Having said all that I dont know how needed something like that is, there are places to get free models. So unless you plan on building a super quality model theres plenty on lod editor splitting work to be done.
Regards
Dave