You 'can' make figures like that in Carrara or probably any modeling app, but as nomuse pointed out it's a lotta work. You might also want to take a look at Animation Master. Character animation is it's strong point, although it would almost lock you out of the poly universe and there are no good resouces of canned AM content if that matters to you. For 250 bucks AM gives you the whole shooting match with no need for plugs. Even die hard Maya users will tell you AM has the best character animation toolset available. On the other hand Carrara plugs are pretty inexpensive so you could buy them as you can afford them, plus you have lots of free poly resources out there on the web. Even though they don't 'communicate' with each other Carrara and AM are my two favorite 3d toys as you can probably tell. My background is engineering and geology, so I can draw an orthogonal view of a rock, but beyond that things get dicey. If you have traditional drawing skills I'm sure you'll end up being able to produce nice work in whatever app(s) you choose.