Rad Video Tools is great. It was developed for doing video work in video games, but does a really nice job of what you want to do. It's free to download and they ask you to donate $10 if you like it. http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm

3DS-Max and Lightwave got left out. Those and all the above will do the job. Blender is free and does a great job, but the interface is only ok. If you have an interest ingetting into games, Max is still the most used app there. Maya is the choice of all the big studios (that are using a basicly off the shelf software). Softimage got bought up by Autodesk and they seem unsure if they want to keep selling it of push the customer base towards their other software. Lightwave was by far the number one software in TV fx and was used in a lot of animation. They lost a huge amount of that market when they decided to rewrite every thing from the ground up and had nothing new for several years. They are working very hard at getting back up with new versions now and it's still in use and works well in a lot of small studios. The others get a fair amount of use all over the place.

Most will give you a free trial. Other then what will get you a job, the big thing is the user interface and price, of course. Check them out. A good way is to get the software and run through several tutorals by different people on each software. Not only do you get to check out the interfaces, you get to learn some animation stuff (a lot is some what transfurable from program to program)

You continue to do great stuff and thank you for sharing how you do it!

Very nice. I like that the plants were 3d and not 2d. It's also nice that you animated enough of the people that it starts to give the feel of being a bit more real. That's one of the nicer walk throughs I've seen

I just watched your tutorals over at the Daz forums and am even more impressed. Last big project I did was 2001, with 7 to 9 computers, about 45 min per frame render times, way to many trade offs and still took around 5 months of render time. The world has changed quite a bit since then and you seem to have a really good handle on both the art and tech sides of it. Outstanding renders given the render times. Thanks for the sharing and the tutorals.

That is very impressive. That's a huge set with a ton of detail. The texturing and finish on every thing matches. Just really nice where nothing looks out of place or like it was done in a different style. I might add a bit more ambiant light and the sky is overly clear of clouds. All in all, a huge amount of really nicely done detailed work

Something like 30+ years ago I did some with supper 8 and 16mm film. If your digital camera takes pictures and numbers them in the order you have taken them life will be much easer. Nothing complicated about it, take a picture, move things a bit, take another, move things a bit..... Just takes a lot of planning to make the movements of any thing except simple objects look right. There are a lot of tricks, most of the ones I learned came from watching the old Gumby tv show.