For many, Maya is the industry standard. I don’t know if this is still the case but when I was at Uni, you could download it and evaluate it indefinitely and there were no restrictions on what could be done and what could be outputted, which was great. It’s also highly malleable as you can add your own scripts from within the software itself. So, if you need specific features you could get a developer to write the appropriate scripts for you.
May I suggest you head over and introduce yourself on the relevant thread.