Wow...so much great info and advice. I wasnt expecting such a large response in one day =)

Quote -  Actually, for animation, I'd suggest you looked into using dynamic hair. After all, that's what it's meant for. With the right settings (and granted, those take TIME to master) you can have very believable hair movements. The same is the case with dynamic clothes. Although conforming clothes move with the figure, it will never look totally real. Dynamic clothes falls, drapes and moves like real fabric (again, given that it's made right!)

I agree. Im a big believer in dynamics for animation. Most of my animations (the ones that have clothes anyway lol) use conforming clothing and/or hair that I have converted into dynamic props using the cloth room in Poser (an example is this one on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0SiQqPh5wk ).
As for the dynamic hair room, I dont really like the hair created there. It looks way too stringy to me as well as being highly computationally intensive to run the dynamics AND render. Turning hair models into dynamic cloth usually gets me a faster and better looking result.
Though, admittedly I probably dont know how to use the hair room as well as I should. The only useful thing I've found for the hair room is creating grass that will blow in the wind realisticly.
(P.S thank you for the kind words about my animation products)

Quote - If it helps, I found modeling to be daunting to say the least. So, I downloaded Wings and just played with it, just played around. I got an idea of what to do in less than a week...
Sometimes, you have to just try with no expectation of success ;o). If you think about the huge picture up front, you may as well give up before you start. Just take baby steps. You might surprise yourself.
Laurie

That's a very good point and actually thats how I got started with animation. Got a copy of Poser never expecting it to lead anywhere and just started pressing buttons to see what would happen.
You're right that if I had the intention then of learning all this stuff about animation then it probably would have seemed too daunting of a task and given up long ago.

Thank you for reminding me that I should approach model making the same way.

Quote - > Quote - I was of the opinion that some vendors wanted to keep their secrets and that is fair enough.

In technical terms, I call these people "dicks".

LOL
I figured that may be the case with at least some of the very talented vendors which is one reason I havent directly messaged any of them with questions. I figured asking in this forum was a better way to gather from a large pool of knowledge anyway.

BTW mark I wasn't aware you did any modeling O_o

From the advice that I've read here it looks as though I need to decide between Wings and Blender to get started.
I will go through the links that have been provided so far.
Thank you all for your contributions to this discussion to this point and more opinions are, of course welcome.