What would be cool is if someone made a standalone converter that took .obj's and sent them to the rc, so long as you stick to a certain naming convention for lod's/proxy's etc that way you could use whatever program you wanted.
I would imagine it would only be useful for cgf's but at least beginners could get there feet wet and decide whether its something they could get into before they start worrying about needing a £3000 piece of software just to participate.
a standalone crytif converter would be very useful too.

No, definetely not .obj because afaik it annot have bones and animations. Use .fbx instead.

Anyway, if the rc were compatible with fbx, everybody could use his favourite modelling program and stick with it.

Well i did say only useful for .cgf's, i think every 3d prog can deal with .obj's, not so with fbx, besides that the .obj is a locked down standard format whereas AD keep messing with .fbx potentially breaking backward compatibility.

if you want my advice :
GO for blender

it's awesome free modelling/animation/rendering....... program and so on
it's actively supported and the community behind are great and very very helpfull

plus you have the Cryengine exporter

Maya and 3Ds Max have the best support for Cryengine. Go with those.

XSI is worth mentioning too.

Seith's Maya to CE3 tools look amazing, so that is another reason to get Maya.

Blender has a CryEngine Exporter? Where is it available?

As other have said go with Blender as its free, dont go splashing out $1000s on somthign you might not be able to get into..

@tracer its already out think its called cryblend or somthing along those lines.. there is a post on these forums about it..

found it..

viewtopic.php?f=315&t=89793

Unity doesn't support animation, bones and rigging in .obj imported files, so there are no bones and keys included in them -> Bad for production. FBX is beside COLLADA the only choice for a good 3D-file format.