http://www.fragmosoft.com/fragMOTION is a powerful 3D modeller specifically intended for the creation and animation of characters. fragMOTION is intuitive and easy to use and contains many features that are only found in top of the line modellers. And if that's not enough for you, the event driven scripting system makes it a breeze for you to add your own features.
Couple of guys at the 3D Game Studio forums mentioned this. They are mainly using it because it is cheap and the developer quickly added support for some features to export to the 3D Game Studio format. I mention it for the price and because it has Lua embedded so you create plugins. Figured some of you who work with both 3D and 2D might find it worth a try at $15.