Swift 3D is what I’d recommend. Real easy to use, great quality exports in various formats that fit with AE. And very inexpensive.
I recently needed an animated 3D ceiling fan for an AE project. Drew the fan blades etc in Illustrator, imported/extruded in Swift, added materials/colors, animated the 3D rotating and exported as raster swf (.mov also possible) with alpha channel. Popped the swf into a layer in the AE Comp, made it loop and there it was, doing its 3D thang within AE.
jgs