Best program to design 3D models?

What's the best program to design 3D models. I am working with a game design group and we need a good 3D model design program. Also another part of the group is making a 2D Street Fighter type of game and we need to know what would be the best route in designing the maps and characters?

Well, I never designed anything for a game so I don't know exactly what you might be looking for in a 3D program, there's many. But, I would go with Maya from Alias Software.

i second maya, it is an industry standard... however extremely expensive.

I third it. GREAT application. Like nucleo says, it's expensive, but it's WELL worth it.

I would have to recommend Blender3D for one thing you can't beat the price. It is Free. It is a powerful open source 3d software. While it may not have every little beel and whistle that maya may have it is the tool that was used for moking story boards for the second Spiderman movie. So at least you know that it can be used professsionaly and it does have a large community of users and tons of online tutorials.

http://www.blender3d.org

There are lots of programs out there that you can use to do this such as lightwave 3d my choice, 3dmax and maya for example. For games it is best to use max as it seems to be a very popular choice wiht game creators alos check into modo by luxology its a universal modeler wiht many great functions. Good Luck

Rhinoceros is a good to design 3d models. You can download the evaluatoin version at
http://download.mcneel.com/rhino/3.0/eval/default.asp


"This fully functional version is the same as the commercial version except that it only saves 25 times. After that it is still fully functional except it will not save. It will still work great to learn Rhino and as a viewer for Rhino and many other file formats."

-http://download.mcneel.com/rhino/3.0/eval/default.asp