I'm not too much of a 3D artist, I'm more of a coder, but I was thinking about adding another skill to my arsenal. I'm looking to create 3D characters -- they don't have to be very advanced -- and I'm looking for a software to work with. I'm not trying to create marcus from gear of war, but I'm looking for something that will create a 3D character. Where should I start?
Blender
hands down. it is free, powerful, and well documented. It also ships with a python-based game engine.
cwald,
The focus of this site is on table-top, pen & paper RPGs; you won't find much help for computer games. That being said, yeah, Blender.
Greywulf does a lot of renders:
http://greywulf.net/category/renders/
He writes tutorials:
http://greywulf.net/tag/tutorial/
He uses DAZ3d.
There are a lot of people who promote Blender because it is free and open source. Blender is not easy to use if you have no experience in 3D art - you get what you pay for, and you have an exceptional learning curve ahead of you.
Creating 3d characters that arn't Legoland type characters is one of the hardest things you can do in 3d.
DAZ Studio is free, and you can work with several 3d base characters - however it only gets better if you buy third party content for it. Poser is an older, more mature, easier to use product which uses (for the most part) the same file format. But you have to pay money for it.
You might also want to consider where your characters are going to be placed. A lot of DAZ art is digital beauty art without much context. That's when another package for doing natural scenery, and a modeller (like the free Blender and other more capable (but not free) 3d products) come in handy.