If animation is your thing then you ought to check out lightwave. The learning curve is steep (not to mention the price) but lightwave is amazingly powerful. You could spend days just inside what they call the Graph Editor. Personally I spend most of my time in Carrara and C4D (I find that both products have very accessible interfaces and can produce great looking output). There's so much to learn when it comes to 3D that you could probably spend a lot of time with Carrara before even needing to possibly upgrade to something more powerful. Carrara's vertex modeler is missing some features (like beveling, knife tool) but is I think a nice friendly introduction to polygon modeling. Carrara makes things like caustics and global illumination seem like child's play (plus the bones are easy to work with although I don't think they are as fully-featured as what you'd find in something like lightwave). Also, the user community for Carrara is usually very helpful (if you ask a dumb question on a lightwave list you're likely to get your head ripped off). I've played with a bit with electric image and thought that it might be a bit advanced/complicated for someone relatively new to 3D (but http://www.dvgarage.com/ does good work).