I use, and recommend, Blender. If you make something with the student license of Autodesk and want to sell it, the $4K is not good.
As far as I can tell, the only things it doesn’t have that other products do are:
-
Nvidia’s various /Maya plugins for effects and physx.*
(*I actually don’t know the workflow for these, I’ve never tried them. Blender might have the same functionality as well, using different methods.)