Blender has improved so much since I first tried it over a decade ago, and in some ways goes toe-to-toe and even surpasses Maya in certain circumstances. With substantial investment from studios, this open source 3D package is currently an excellent option for both professional and hobbyist creators. As a 3D generalist working in games for the better part of my professional career, I haven't quite gotten away from Maya and ZBrush, but this is not some poorly supported free solution but a full fledged 3D tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, but at the same time, there are a ton of educational resources as well. Enjoy!

There are plenty of pros and cons to Maya LT. As a 3D artist working in game development, I subscribed to Maya LT for personal use, mainly as a modeling tool in to use conjunction with Zbrush and to make simple rigs for export into Unity. To be honest, I found going from a fully-featured version of Maya to Maya LT is a bit difficult. Although it was nice to have a familiar interface, and I completely understood the removal of rendering, I found myself constantly searching for tools that were would have made animation creation so much easier. It was when I had to use the software on a professional project with other animators that I really found the flaws in LT. The lack of rig referencing in particular made it terribly difficult to keep characters in sync, and cut scenes were an enormous pain to orchestrate without it. ATOM, connection editor, Python scripting, and even (at the time) spline IK were all things that were sorely missed. So basically, if you are a novice who wants to learn Maya instead of Blender, and are only doing small personal projects, it is fine, but I would heavily recommend against using it for anything larger.