Whoops, forgot about lightwave! Lightwave is a nice program.. if you want to start with something, start with that. The price is desent too. It doesn''t have as big of a backing as MAX, tutorial wise, but there is some stuff out there if you finish the basics.

-Serpent Warrior
The Irish Bunny Project
Looking for modelers, coders, and skinners
------------------

blender is great but for a newbie it looks like hells door. the ui at first is a mess but after u learned it its petty simple(well it seems simple). its learning curve is extreamely steap(not to scare u or anything) it will take some time to learn. but for the price it has a lot of fetures that the high costing programs have.

ps im a newbie using blender so if something i said is wrong feel free to correct me.

ts4 is not buggy, well it has somebugs(4.3) but its stable enougth, easy and powerfull.
it is true, talent is all u need. if ur a great artist the companies will train u to use the software they use. even if u start using the lowest program/technique there is(pencil and paper), and ur good, theyll hire u. but if u think knowing the programs will get u anywhere it will be in the programs support jobs, it is true for some companies they sometimes require that u know the software.

high end 3d programs and the roles they play in movies/games.

ok, ive read a lot of different people saying different things about episode one. the fact of the matter is...ILM uses whatever is the best software for the occasion.

point in fact - the pod race scene was done entirely in Maya - simply because of the powerful MEL scripting and dynamics. (i know because i was at the Maya Users Group Meeting)

The battle between the droids and gungans was done in Softimage - because Soft is the best software for Character animation / motion capture data. (I know because I was also at the Softimage Users Group Meeting)

i dont know what they used for the space scenes so it very well could have been formZ and electric image. i know that ILM is very fond of Electric image.

now they might have modelled everything with something else...formZ (shudder), but in any case - they use whatever is best suited for the occasion.

and i agree with digisoap on almost everything. but you also left out Nendo and Mirai. Now ive never heard of anybody using mirai, but it looks pretty good to me. as far as nendo goes...squaresoft uses it. nintendo uses it. but its mostly for characters. squaresoft used ths for ff7 among many other games. of course they do all of their FMVs in Maya.

ok...taken too much time...must stop now.

-Luxury

side note - Pixar uses their propriatary software called "Marionette"