Is 3D Toolkit really a good choice for newbies? Even with the dvgarage tutorials it seems like Electric Image is a more advanced app along the lines of Lightwave, Maya, SoftImage and Max. Newbies maybe should be thinking Carrara, Strata, TrueSpace, Animation Master, Cool 3D Studio, Swift 3D or even Xara3D, etc. C4D seems to fall somewhere in the middle. Seems like a two-tiered world where maybe you want to cut your teeth on something less complicated before you dive into one of the big boys. Supposedly Maya has been revamped to make it more newbie-friendly (and I think the forthcoming lwave 8 may have some of this as well) but I tried the Maya demo and couldn't make any sense out of it. And, if you aren't doing character animation (and especially if you're just doing stills) then maybe the big boys are gross overkill.