I personally would recommend you to start with creating your own meshes -> after that do the animation part. Depending on your 3d program I can post you some useful tutorials. 
In my opinion the easiest way to learn a 3d program is to watch basic tutorials + constantly try to create your own meshes (you will see that you get better and better with every mesh)
I personally prefer blueprints, because they are easy to use + you can create something in a pretty short period of time.