In my previous job I taught a semester course in 3D game programming at a polytechnical in the Netherlands. Before entering the course, the students all had at least 2 years of experience in Java programming, 3D modeling and texturing and UI design.
After half a year, about 25% of the students was capable of building a very basic 3D game in C++ with Ogre. ODE (a physics engine library) was too complicated for most of the students.

Which illustrates that programming 3D applications is quite complicated. stewer might have a good point: learn Python and the PoserPython librrary and start writing handy little utilities for Poser. If you are cut out for programming, you can have your first utility worth distributing in 100-150 hours.

I just remembered Xith. That's a Java wrapper around OpenGL - good performance, and a far easier API than OpenGL itself. The Java programming language is also easier to learn than C++. And if you want to switch to C++ after a couple of years, you can use almost all your Java knowledge directly.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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