Newbie question of which 3d program is best

[dargo]

Be patient I am sure you guys get this same old question from novice but which program works best for cheating characters for an animation project?  I plan on trying my hand at a space adventure which will need the usual ships and such but my main focus will be on characters.  Needless to say I will need a good program for the usual green skinned, antenna wearing and tentacle bearing characters via star trek and star wars.
     I have dabbled with some programs.  I found 3ds max addictive once you get the hang of it and zbrush a lot of fun.  Poser is great but limiting and I don't quite get the creative feel with it like the others.
    Before delving any further I was just wondering which programs of combination of programs works best for you guy?

[paulscode]

I use Autodesk 3DS Max for animations, and it seems to work quite well.  It even has most of the common stuff pre-programmed, such as humanoid skeletal heirarchy and customizable walking/running animation.  If you have access to Max, I would say stick with that.

As for Poser, I doubt it would be very useful for creating animated game characters, just because the models tend to be super high-poly.  It is possible to reduce the poly count (as I outlined in the wiki), but if you tried to do that for each keyframe, the polys on the reduced keyframe models wouldn't match, so you couldn't use them for animations.

If you'd rather go the free route instead of buying an expensive modeling program, you could try Blender.  I've never personally done animations with Blender, so I can't say how easy it is.  But it is free.