Look carefully at Maya. It is going to be difficult to improve on THAT interface. Bill Buxton really knows his stuff, and has created the interface that is propelling Maya towards ubiquity.
Are you going to write the renderer too? One step at a time! Make your modeller/key framer output renderman and then you can use BMRT until you've written your own.
By all means, look at Blender, but don't even consider C#. QT is an excellent suggestion - many many graphics people prefer the mac (for good reason) and Linux is making great inroads in this arena, displacing SGI. QT will guaranteed crossplatform capbility.
Fake it all in Python first, then code the critial stuff in C++. Use Python as a scripting language - there's already a ton of 3D and image support and you won't be alone. Many of the large houses use Python to tie things together.
Also of great interest should be the Lightflow renderer. Gorgeous imagery and a (albeit limited) Python wrapper for scripted scene generation.
And if you're going to do MOCAP, for heaven's sake avoid Euler angles. Quaternions applied early on will save you a lot of grief later.
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Look carefully at Maya. It is going to be difficult to improve on THAT interface. Bill Buxton really knows his stuff, and has created the interface that is propelling Maya towards ubiquity. Are you going to write the renderer too? One step at a time! Make your modeller/key framer output renderman and then you can use BMRT until you've written your own. By all means, look at Blender, but don't even consider C#. QT is an excellent suggestion - many many graphics people prefer the mac (for good reason) and Linux is making great inroads in this arena, displacing SGI. QT will guaranteed crossplatform capbility. Fake it all in Python first, then code the critial stuff in C++. Use Python as a scripting language - there's already a ton of 3D and image support and you won't be alone. Many of the large houses use Python to tie things together. Also of great interest should be the Lightflow renderer. Gorgeous imagery and a (albeit limited) Python wrapper for scripted scene generation. And if you're going to do MOCAP, for heaven's sake avoid Euler angles. Quaternions applied early on will save you a lot of grief later.