I really like 3ds max and have to agree I found it easy to learn. There are two downfalls to max, cost and it's booleans are rubbish.

I currently use Blender, but it's UI scares off half the people who look at it and you need three arms and a keyboard with 500 keys.

I thought c4d was great all round except for it's material handling which I hate ( I have version 6 so it may have improved!) good choice, can't wait to see what you do with it!

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.