3d art software, where do I begin?

[squ1sh]

I'm a fledgling game art developer (yeah... competitive business, wish me luck!) and was looking to start learing some 3d software. Here are the options I've come up with.

Maya 7
3ds MAX 8
Lighwave Studio
Bryce 5.5

I am serious on doing the art, so I'm not looking for the "happy go lucky" watered down versions. From what I've seen, they all are capable of doing very impressive visuals.
My question is this. What program would you recommend and why? Or do you know of a good 3d art discussion site (other than DeviantArt which I go to frequently).

 

[Quasmo]

Maya is generally the standard for game design, thats what they teach at my school (SCAD).

 

[UglyCasanova]

cgtalk

And please take Bryce off of there lol!

 

[squ1sh]

I shall remove bryce then!

 

[BenSkywalker]

3DSMax is still the standard for the industry, although Maya is making a lot of headway. Max has always been rather custom tailored to game design while Maya in the past focused on movie studio level CGI- now they have expanded their focus and at this point it is looking like they will end up taking over in the long run(younger kids coming up are overwhelmingly educated using Maya- mainly the old guard sticking to Max at this point).

Lightwave is rather lacking in the tools area comparitively, after Maya and Max I would say that SoftImage XSI would be the third option if you are looking to learn them all. That isn't from a popularity standpoint, more useability. XSI is very nice because it plays well with all of the other packages which tends to be a major issue for a lot of packages.

Bryce is long outdated and not decent for modeling on today's levels in terms of gaming anyway(you can make scenes that look a lot better then current games do, but the way in which you have to do it makes it unuseable for gaming not to mention any of the above mentioned software will slaughter Bryce in no uncertain terms when you want to make CGI level animations).