CompuServe Messages

I am looking for a 3D Modeling Program with advanced animation capabilities in the IBM platform to use primarily for modeling and animations for game programing, both of which I'm trying to learn. I'm currently looking into Playmation/Animation Master (Hash), Imagine 3.0 (Impulse). and trueSpace (Caligari). Playmation's strengths seems to be in character modeling and animation, but I was wondering what the drawbacks were to pure spline based modeling. Also, I heard it was difficult to get a feel for coloring and texture mapping without a full rendor. Most of the output looks a little plastic to me, but this could just be the nature of the examples I saw. I was wondering about how detailed a model could be (i.e. photorealistic) and how this compares to polygon based programs in terms of file size and render time. Imagine appears very full featured, but I question the awful user interface (especially since it's DOS based). I had a little trouble working with it in the "3D Moldling Lab", as some of the attributes did not work as described. and the whole axes thing was a little confusing (and I'm NOT a computer novice by any means). TrueSpace has the best interface (although it's slooowww), but the animation portion appears weak and the rendering seems a little grainy to me. However, I was using a demo version so I'm not sure if there is any difference in the full version. Any thoughts would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!! Regards, Tony