You have the time.
You have the money.
Which do you learn and why?
- Maya
- 3ds Max
- Blender
- Some combination of the above
- Other
- Your question is wrong, you insensitive clod!
Wake me up when the gun fight is over. 
3ds Max since I’ve been using it since 3.0 and the others are just a bunch of trash. 
Well it is like this. The instrument doesn’t define the artist.
Depends on what exactly you wanna do.
If you just wanna do hobby game everything, modeling, rigging, animation, blablabla. Then it doesnt really matter. Save some money, do blender, whatever.
If you wanna go pro and land a job at some larger studio some day, take Maya.
In the end the quesiton is also:
For the record It is always the artist and not the tool, but that’s also half the truth, without the proper tools the artist has to work twice as hard and the results may not be as well as they planned.
As for Max, Autodesk is not going to kill off its second largest cash cow anytime soon that’s for sure.
With that said, I detest Autodesk’s approach on both pricing and so called “innovation” in their software. I had to spend 4500$ on top of max’s bloated price tag to get it to a production ready state. And I would gladly pay double that if I could for the companies behind those plugins. More than I could ever say for Autodesk and their greed infested management.
I don’t even want to start on Maya… I used that thing for years on the side in a production environment. And I can tell you horror stories. But then again we have them in all software, some more than others.
Max was king in games and in cinematics. And so was Softimage before that and before it was chopped off by none other than the brilliant minds at Autodesk. I think max and even Softimage are still great in what they do with many respects. As for popularity in everyday normal workflow It is clear that Autodesk is trying to shove Maya everywhere especially in universities and other learning channels as their primary go to software for games and movies (even if it falls short on so many features that require you to either hire an army of scriptwriters or buy plugins worth more than those sold for max) they are trying to create a new breed of Maya Loyal users so they can isolate their software and put them in packages. Almost all animators graduating these days are Maya oriented people. Why? because Autodesk forces the institutions into a norm corner as in Maya is now the “industry standard”. To back their false claim for the past 10 years they do little to nothing to improve animation features of Max, even with a nearly 20 year old “biped tech” in Max, it is still superior to the human ik found in Maya today. That tells you a lot of what Max could be If Autodesk decides to put a tiny bit of investment into it. It’s internal cloth simulation (year 2002 tech) is far superior in result and approach than that of Maya out of the box one. The studio we worked with had to get a cloth plugin to get anything production ready done in Maya and that cost as much as one Maya perpetual licence per seat. Just look at Cinematics at Blur today all simulated and rendered in Max which has seen little to nothing of a major update since Blizzard did their first cinematics with it for Warcraft 3 back in 1999 - 2001 (talk about artistry vs tools those cinematics from Blizzard hold up easily to this day).
Anyway I could go on forever.
The best case scenario for anyone who has the time or is starting up these days in games is Blender (even if you have to put up with an awkward interface and some shortcomings, maybe those shortcomings may not be that evident in games productions).
But yea it’s the same story with threads like these but many of us can’t help but to express some frustration with large corporations and their monopoly (just head over to Autodesk forums you’ll see some fo the fury). Nothing much you can do about it really in the short term, but in the long term they will be losing that’s for sure. Most freelancers are moving to either Blender, Houdini or Cinema4d. and large studios are slowly building their own tech to stop paying homage to Autodesk. The second one is what would hurt most for Companies like Autodesk and that would take time.
I prefer blender to do everything for me, it is easy to use and free, which makes it more efficient… specially in game design there is nothing better than that… apart from the texture painting… blender needs a bit of improvement in texture painting… so i suggest some other software for it, for example substance painter or Mari, i use Photoshop to do the trick but sometimes its a bit difficult specially working on the edges… but i can achieve my target well from it…
Blender. It’s done everything I’ve ever needed to and the gui is reasonably straightforward. I’ve never had it glitch or cause any issues with my workflow.
I really wanted to make a large post about how much I detest Autodesk and how archaic their product UIs are, but I’m not gonna.
Anyway, I use MODO Indie and Blender for modeling.
Why?
-I actually enjoy modeling in MODO due to ease of use and speed. I can fly in MODO when it comes to modeling.
-MeshFusion and the retopo tools are worth the sub fee alone.
-The UI doesn’t hurt my eyes like literally every other 3D package I’ve used.
-I can get a 3 month subscription for $30.
The reason I have Blender installed is in case I hit the 100k poly obj export limit of MODO Indie. If that happens, I can just cut the model up and put it back together in Blender. Overall though, MODO has been near perfect for me and Autodesk can eat it.
Edit: FrankieV is wrong. Just needed to clear that up in case anyone actually decided to listen to him.
Second edit: Got a PM asking for differences between MODO Indie and full MODO. So, full MODO is like 1800 GBP or Euros (I can’t remember which) and is fully featured whereas MODO Indie is subscription based ($14/1 month, $30/3 months or $60/6 months) and has a few features removed/limitations, with the most notable being no scripting/3rd party plugins and 100k poly obj export limit. For a full rundown, go here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/321540