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Blender
Blender is a 3d modeling/animation program available free for multiple platforms. It's interface is a little hard to use at first, but quite powerful once you learn to use it.
I recently went through a blender kick, and found myself begining to get some actual skill. One of my major breakthroughs was finding the modern blender community forum, Elysiun. Blender is now in full flung open source development and is again improving quickly.
Modelling & Rigging:
After a bit of practice I was able to come up with models straight from my head, using only reference images. I found mirroring to be very helpful. Also, I learned to build rigging for my own characters so they could be posed and animated.
Animation:
I had tried to get things moving properly in blender, but didn't get things quite right until I found the Animation Curves display. I got a wonderful chance to hone my skills at the 10 Second Club The 10 second club is a character animation contest in which you get a 10 second sound clip, and create an animation to go along with it. Click below for a simplified copy of the animation.
Rendering:
One of the greatest challenges to getting your final model or animation to look right is the proper lighting, surfaces and redering to do your hard work justice. I found Yafray Yafray brought my work to the next level. It is a bit of a pain to get it to work with Blender, but I'll spare you the details, since word on the street is, Blender will support yafray internally Very Soon Now (TM). Click the image below for a larger version.
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