Just thought I would share some of my work here. I am working on a 3D animated cartoon based in the World of Warcraft. This part of a scene was animated in Messiah Studio 3.0 and Lightwave 3D.
Looks pretty cool so far. I've never used Messiah Studio, but Lightwave is awesome. If you want to do some bad-ass contact sparks, set up collision dynamics on your energy swords, and then parent an HV-emitter to them. You can then tell it to cue the spark emitters wherever the swords clash. You might also consider adding a couple lights to the seen in order to frame the foreground character a little better.
While we're showing off 3D work, here's my demo-reel from the first semester of my 3D animation class: