Hey everyone, so we have a starting group and were just new to the game development scene, since we're new we cannot decide on what 3d application we should use. We want to focus on modeling and animation. :)

Okay, I gotta ask: did you look at Blender? Is there a reason to totally rule it out?

From what you write I can only guess it is a group ob hobby devs, or a startup of sorts... so I guess price is important in your decision what to choose. Blender is opensource and completly free. No need to be a student to get a free or reduced price copy.

Of course there are downsides: the User Interface of Blender is kinda clunky and has somewhat of a learning curve. But from sheer capabilities, it is more or less on par with the two big Autodesk 3D PAckages you mentioned (minus some tools and plugins, plus some others...)

Other than that, other people that have more expierence with the Autodesk suites can help you out more I guess.

Unfortunately there are few 'one package solves everything' items out there and you need to balance things based on your target. First, for modeling in general, most artists don't tend to work in either Max or Maya exclusively for that and tend to use a pipeline of tools. For instance, one of my modelers tends to work as follows: Silo 3D for rough shape modeling, ZBrush for detailing, Max for application of final materials. But, on the other side, many (most?) of the artists who do animation tend to prefer the tools available in Maya over most other packages. Finally, programmers will tend to prefer writing plugins for Maya over Max since the SDK is so much cleaner, but unfortunately the choice is often forced on folks to be Max because that has a longer history of supporting games.

If I had to suggest on though, I'd probably suggest Maya since it makes life easier on the programmers and most of the places it doesn't work "great" are fixed through use of other tools. I've shipped games which had no custom editors and through use of plugins, our level editing and everything was part of Maya. Max *can* do similar but it it generally a much more difficult undertaking. Of course I'd have to say that Max is the 'prettier' of the two and Maya is quite utilitarian out of the box, primarily this is because Maya is designed to be customized, not so much used as a stock install.

As to Blender, if your artists can use it, it can work quite well. Other packages to consider in the long run (though more niche of course): Modo, Lightwave, Houdini, Cinema 3D and a whole slew of others.

It's a tough choice and there is no "one best" answer unfortunately.

if we throw 3D Modelling tool names around, gotta mention 3D Coat... it is my tool of choice for 3D Sculpting and also was my goto tool for texturing until I found other tools (see below).

The cool thing is you can sculpt in Voxels, which means you do not need to worry about topology while you sculpt, and only start worrying about meshes when you create the final game ready topology during the retopo step. There are pros and cons compared to ZBrush, but seeing that the full license is half that of ZBrush, I think it is a terrific deal.

For Texturing I am experimenting now with DDO. It makes texturing much easier as it can solve some tedious tasks automatically for you, like creating masks for edge wear and stuff like that. I also comes with a large library of scanned materials that are quite usable, if I might say. Again, its not all as shiny as the dev makes it look like in the videos, but if you invest some time to get the hang of it and optimize your UV layouts a bit for it, it will save you some time while texturing.

I am doing lots of hard surface modelling lately, and as I wanted to do some NURBS modelling, 3D Coat does not support that yet and I don't like to use Blender for modelling too much (I use it to assemble the parts I export from 3D Coat to the final model though), I gave MoI a try... its a small speciality app for NURBS modelling, basically a CAD-lite program, and it does make creating small NURBS models as easy as it can be. Really useful to create basic shapes that I can then import to 3D Coat and use them for some Hardsurface Model details.

I also have plenty other tools lying around that I use for speciality tasks. I bought the Substance Suite while it was reduced price but ended up liking DDOs approach to texturing better. Still I found that the Substance Designer makes it really easy to create Curvature maps from an existing mesh and normal map, which is a very important maps for automatic mask creation in DDO.

I also have CrazyBump lying around, which is useful to generate all kind of maps when other tools fail. The quality of generated maps is not always the best, but it always works, whereas getting usefull AO maps from Substance Designer is hit and miss.

But really, this is as much a matter of taste as a matter of cfunctionalities. Big 3D Packages like Blender or Maya often have built in tools that allow you to do the same things as speciality apps like ZBrush, they just tend to be less good at that one thing that the speciality app concentrates on. Blender also lets you sculpt, but of course both ZBrush and 3D Coat are much more powerful when it comes to sculpting, and using NURBS in Blender is much less intuitive than using NURBS in MoI.

In the end it is a question of what you can afford, what you like best (most tools have trial periods, use them and test as many tools as you can), and yes, as Serapth mentioned, what your intention is with learning these tools. Having a new, not so well known tool like 3D Coat on your CV will impress a potential employer much less than ZBrush, which is pretty much industry standart... but if you create 3D Models as a freelancer, for your own game or just for fun, nobody will care what tool you did use (as long as you export it to a common format that is)

I would recommend 3DS Max too. I tried learning both 3DS Max and Maya. Maya I was just completely lost on and never was able to make anything with it, but with Max I was able to do all the tutorials with pretty much no problem.