Hey guys, been a while since I posted anything. I have been going through some courses and learning animation and modeling some more. After toying around for so long and seeing how much work it takes to get a nice mesh and rig, I stumbled across this gem, Make Human.... I don't know why I have never seen it mentioned anywhere, but man is it awesome.
You can get it here, http://www.makehuman.org/
You can customize the mesh quite a bit inside the program, add clothing, hair, a few different mesh topologies with varying poly counts, all sorts of goodies. It is all CC0 license. I do not know about 3DS and the other programs you guys may use, but when exporting as a MHK file from it, you can select a few different rig's ( their own nice rig, rigify, and a few others). Blender has an addon that you just need to enable in the properties of blender to import the make human files. Then you have a nice mesh, fully rigged, and ready to animate.