Hi there!
3D nowadays is not just the future of graphics but it's the present and will continuously dominate movie, advertisement, graphic industries.
If you're interested in 3D please feel free to ask everything about it here!
So first, ask yourself what industry would you want to be into.
Game industry?
Advertisement or Broadcasting industry?
Artistry
Movie industry?
or just a hobbyist?
what You need:
1. 3D Graphics Software that can Model, Animate, Render like:
Maya
3DS Max
or Softimage.
Originally these 3 were in competition with each other. But now, they have been acquired, owned, and developed by the monster AUTODESK.
If you're gonna ask me what would I recommend, I would say you try it all for you to see the
difference (you can download trial version anyway), whatever you find yourself comfortable using with.
All of those softwares are as complex as each other and can do whatever the other one can do.
So if anyone says, Maya is better than the two or vice versa, believe me, same company developed those softwares so what do you think the difference would be?
The difference is in the process of doing things, and ofcourse Graphical User Interface and their naming convention.
3 years ago when I started, I used 3DS Max, then I tried Maya, then shifted to Softimage.
Cinema4D is the present's fastest renderer. Commonly used for Broadcasting, used in natgeo, discovery, bbc, cnn. Etc.
Blender is a freeware, originally designed for Linux but they made it available for Windows and Mac.
2. Image Editing software like:
Photoshop, Lots of image editing softwares out there, but this one rocks the market hard.
You gonna need this to edit Texture of your 3D model. 3D Texture includes, color, texture, bump. etc.,
3. If you want to design high detailed non-animated model you need:
Mudbox by Autodesk
or ZBrush
These two softwares allows you to do "3D Sculpting and painting". Imagine yourself being an sculptor using a computer, Way cool!
4. You gonna need a decent Pen tab for sculpting your character and painting texture.
5. PC, hehe! You can't do 3D without this, hahaha! Faster of course the better. High GPU, CPU. I recommend using 64Bit version of operating system so that you can use 8GB to 16GB of RAM.
These are the process the you need to know and understand.
1. 3D Modeling --> where you model a character, object etc.
2. 3D Texturing --> where you add detail after you model
3. Rigging --> preparing your model to be animated, like putting some Bones/Joints on your character and having controls over it.
4. Lighting --> Like in photography, light makes your image interesting. In 3D you can control the Light yourself.
5. Rendering --> This one usually takes a long time, even on fast computers. Why? Because software you are using is calculating the color,detail, lights, shadows of each pixel of the image.
Below are my 3D pics, hehehe! One of my dreams as a child is to become a superhero or an angel! Something that took me about a month and a half(per model) to finish.