I've been watching the jeff lew videos and trying to decide which tool(s) to use for character animation. Hash Animation Master is inexpensive and seems to have a lot of features although I've heard it's unstable and I haven't seen a lot of realistic-looking renders from it (more cartoony stuff). Lightwave v7.5 has some character animation tools(with more to come in v8) but everybody seems to use Project Messiah but I've been playing with a demo of that and finding it a bit wonky in spots (although I do like the way it can pipeline into multiple programs). I guess Maya is the answer although I don't find that program easy to understand or use and it still costs $2k. TrueSpace seems to have lots of animation features but I just can't get my mind around all those tiny little icons. Hopefully Carrara v4 will have some more tools for character animation. Even though C3 introduced bones I haven't seen many examples yet of people doing cool character animation in Carrara.