Gotlaik

Can't I use something like this?

I have a 960 now, will this be enough? I don't want to change too much of my PC as long as it's not necessary..

960 is fine.
 
I would keep using that.
 
Your benefits really diminish a ton unless you are doing incredibly complex workloads, which you aren't doing as you are just learning.

Well we might as well get you started on 8 cores just to be safe. 

So Blender, 3ds max and cinema 4d are doing a lot of numerical operations. Those types of workloads require a lot of cash, a decent amount of ram and last but not least a lot of FPU (floating point unit) performance.
 
This means that the workload scales pretty good with more cores. Depending on your budget you can go with a Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7 or on the higher end intel i9 or threadripper

cheapest upgrade for you is to sell your i5, get another 8gb of ram and a used 4790k.
otherwise i would go for a ryzen 1700, 16gb ddr4 and a new motherboard.