Recommend a 3D package/plugin for me?

I do a lot of 3D CGI myself - and I'd agree with the overall direction in this thread - the two obvious candidates are Cimema and Blender.

All of the well known 3D apps will give you an amazing toolset - and a lifetime of learning. None of them have 'everything' - but all of them have more than you'll probably ever use. I very much doubt you'd run into any serious limitation anytime soon.

Cinema (C4D) is generally regarded as the easiest 3D app to learn, Blender offers unbeatable value ; ). Both are plenty powerful.

One word of caution: C4D lite, as you know, is the AE bundled 'plug-in' version of the app. Rendering and interactivity via Cineware is dog slow - and not representitive of performance of the main versions. By all means start to learn C4D using Lite - but if you're serious, get one of the standard versions. IMHO - forget about Element and the other AE plugins. Yes, they are great if you just want to do some basic 3D text etc - but If you want to do real 3D you need a real 3D program : )

Thanks to everyone for the replies, I really appreciate the suggestions.

"Element 3D" is used to bring existing 3D objects, made in Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, etc and exported as .OBJ, into

After Effects. It's not a 3D modelling app.

As suggested above, start off with AE's bundled Cinema 4D Lite version.

Short answer: start with C4D Lite

Mylenium covered most of it but what you're asking about is delvig deep into 3d image craft. There's many ways to do what you're after and a lot of that knowledge overlaps in multiple programs. Start playing with what you have for free as a means of learning and make an educated decision when you hit the limitations of it.

At this point I don't want to delve into learning any package unless I know it can do what I hope to achieve.

Let me be brutally blunt:

photorealism is what I'm after.

"Photorealism" doesn't fall out of the blue in any package. Even advanced commercial renderers like VRay don't produce hyperrealistic imagery at the push of a button. It can take weeks, months, years to understand how a specific shading model works, how it interacts with virtual lighting, how materials need to be tweaked. And even statements like this make no sense:

I don't necessarily need a lot of objects or polygons

One goes together with the other. You can have the most detailed textures in the world, but when you slap them onto low-res geometry they still won't look "real". Conversely, all the transparent texturing, bump map and normal map cheats in the world won't save you in many cases. Just pause any current game that looks awesome in motion - a lot of that completely falls apart when you analyse the trickery in a still frame.

Overal lit seems to me you have a wrong understanding of the whole process on so many levels and your elaborate list is totally contradictory anbd to some extent pretty nonsensical. All the tools you mentioned can offer some kind of "Photorealism", but of course not necessarily out of the box. You have to master them. So in the end it doesn't matter which one you choose if you don't commit to learning it properly. That ultimately is the whole point. Magic buttons don't exist and looking for shortcuts doesn't help you become a good VFX artist.

And of course this can be expanded in any direction because prepping the shoot and palnning the shot layout is just as important for good VFX work. Even if you were an accomplished CG artist already, you could still totally screw it up with wrong greenscreen procedures and so on.

Mylenium