arithma The last software I've used is 3DStudio max, but quite unprofessionally. We also used some Autocad and Mechanical Desktop (constraint based modelling) back at university part of my Engineering degree. There's quite a lot of new kids on the block like Blender, I've never played with Maya (which last I used 3DSMax was a competing product, not another product under the same umbrella) and some other few software suites I've forgotten the names of. Anyone has any idea here about this?
Padre Maya and 3DSmax, altho under same "umbrealla" as you might call it, still kept their original spirit. to some extent. I found that animators tend to prefer Maya, due to it's interface and keying features, and modelers / VFX tend to prefer Max. Honestly, i think they both are great, u just have to know how to use them and adapt. What exactly is that your looking for ?
jsaade well blender is used by most indies andstartups considering it is free. you can start with it to learn the key concepts about modeling. and as Padre said it is a choice between modeling and animation and taste actually.
arithma I don't have anything serious in mind, I just want to have fun with some inverse kinematics and possibly tease what I've learned at school to create some correctly controlled mechs. Think big transformers with big rotating shapes and sounds as they stomp the ground. I know for a fact that I don't have the artistic side that this thing needs, but on the other hand the creative tease this kind of work creates can affect the way you think about everything. Am most familiar with 3dsmax (thinking about it, maxscript was the next language after Visual Basic, and not C++). Most reviews of blender say that it's too hard or too out of Earth? Not for us? What about all those sculpt tools, anyone used anything like that? I'd hate to have to go back to maxforums.org (shivers).
J4D simply, you can use Google sketch-up and sketchy physics plugin to do exactly what you want. (no coding involved) http://sketchup.google.com/ http://code.google.com/p/sketchyphysics/
arithma CATIA 5 is new for me, thanks mesa. Google SketchUp sounds serious too, thought it was a gimmick.
MegaCool I know that might has nothing to do with the topic, but I suggest you have a look at Terragen 2 - its free, powerful and only 7mb. A great tool to toy with rendering some landscape scenes.