You won't hear any snide remarks concerning trueSpace from me ... it was one of my first 3D applications, and I still use it occasionally. Unfortunately, I haven't kept up with the upgrades (despite Caligari's best and frequent efforts to sell them to me), so I can't give an honest appraisal of the more recent feature sets.

I built Sabrina (who evolved into Furrette) entirely with MilkShape, a polygon modeler. Although I used various techniques to create the entire figure (extrusion, box modeling, mirroring, etc.), I laboriously assembled her face polygon-by-polygon in order to match the cartoon character's facial features as closely as possible.