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I'm thinking of using the modelling program; maya, but i'm not sure yet.

could you recommend it??

no, i would recomend c4d, but thats probably 'cos i use it

why not read some tuts on it and then compare them to tuts for other programs, see which ones easier for you, thats how i chose c4d.

I recommend it. I use it for everything I do and it's awesome. If you are a college (and maybe even high-school) student you can buy a student version for around 350 dollars. Maya takes some getting used to but it is so awesome.

I have tried a lot of programs (demos mostly)myself and have looked into others.

Maya is good, its what a lot of professionals in the main industry use, same for 3D studio max, there are the difficult amongst the two, but there are the resources out there for you. These two are in the 1000's for price

Cinema 4D, in my experience is the easiest to learn, I have stuck with Cinema 4D CE 6 for over a year now, although old and really out of date in technology, I found to enjoy using it, but now I feel limited and am moving onto Lightwave rather than upgrading to version 10. Lightwave is about $760 and Cinema 4D base is more, but then you can buy many 'modules' to Cinema 4D which puts it higher in the chain, with such power animation, dynamics, hair, render and more modules. Lightwave comes with all of its features standard, which plugins can be downloaded and bought, such as sasquatch which tackles hair modelling.

Lightwave, I've been playing with the demo, it is a rival of Cinema 4D, but like it its is fairly easy to learn and use, and comes with plenty of features, both Cinema 4D and lightwave have been used by professionals, Open Season used Cinema 4D and Shadow of Colossus used Lightwave.

Softimage|XSI the cheap alternative to the professionally used apps, for a measly $500 starting price it comes packed with a lot of tools, a lot of game biased tools suching as baking, normal mapping and such like (So does LW and C4D, but the base of SI is cheaper) it also takes the capabilities of the professionally used renderers such as Renderman, Mental Ray and V ray, Mental ray comes standard. It has some amazing animation tools as well, so much so Avid released Softimage|CAT which is plugin for 3DS Max in order to use XSI's animation capabilities. But softimage can be hard to learn to start with.

Blender
Its free, its powerful, but some don't like it, it has a long learning curve, once you have got your head around it, things are so much clearer, I am trying to help my friend learn this one.

TrueSpace
I used to use TrueSpace 5.2 at the time was very buggy, it didn't have anything special, but it was a good program with a cool facial animator that once set up automatically creates morph poses for your face, it was fun to play with, TrueSpace 7 however comes with vray and has a 'real time renderer' which makes good use of shader technology to make your scene look fancy whilst working on it. Other new features, I don't know

GameSpace
TrueSpace with less features and is cheaper

Vray costs extra with TrueSpace 7 (several hundred dollars, I believe).

oh right, fair enough, my bad.

Try out the personal learning edition of maya first, if you like then buy maya. I personally think maya is a bit over priced but it's your money

Good point Vamp. *shudders* I just remembered my days of teaching maya at my old school and having that terrible watermark over everything...

Yeah, the blender learning curve is like "a fat man riding up a steep hill on a bicycle" I've been told haha.

Blenders not all that bad, once you learn the keyboard short cuts it becomes second nature.

RF

lol, no kidding. I took the leap from milkshape to blender and i could not handle it at first because milkshape is just for one single object for a game and in blender you get all sorts of new tools like uv mapping and setting up cameras for videos. It takes a lot of playing around with and tutorial reading to get used to it.

Right now i'm learning maya in college and it is great, the interface is really easy to get familar with and has more tools than i can even think of using. Anyway, if I had the money i would have maya, but since i don't i use it a lot at school and have blender at home.

edit: whoops