F4lc0n

Thanks deekr. That's actually very good advice.

Even though I have access to Maya and 3DS Max I still started out with Blender - because there are just more tutorials / books available. But the idea of just taking a base mesh to animate it is very good. I will give it a try once I understood the basics of 3d Modeling.

So with Unity 4 you create the animations in Unity rather then in Blender? Does it make a difference?

@rouncer: that's exactly the level of detail I'm aiming to achieve. Enough to test it out and to get the gist of the underlying system. How long did it take you to model and animate something like this? Did you use Blender or 3DS Max?

Thanks for the input. I don't plan on working as a 3D Modeller but still I figure from your answers that I should neglect sculpting (tools) for the time being. I will try to find some learning material for Maya then, since it's an industrie standard and thus should work flawlessly with Unity3D and I will keep Blender as a fallback option.

Nobody mentioned tools like Cinema 4D, Cheetah3d, Modo or Lightwave - so I guess those are outdated.