Just a quick question to everybody here. Do you prefer to make a base mesh for your model in a traditional program like Maya or do you do it all in Zbrush with Z spheres? and why?
zbrush of course…lol coz it’s pretty much the bomb and besides…it’s the only program I am familiar enough with to model decently 
The reason I ask is because I don’t know if I should focus on making the entire model in Z or learn to make base meshes in Maya. I am still new to modeling and I havn’t been able to develop a style yet.
for modelling its easier to use 3ds Max, it surpasses Maya in the modeling department at least for base meshes and what not, though if you were to animate it, Maya would be you’re best bet.
Zbrush is really great for detailing and making extremely high poly models.
Really? I always thought it was MAYA that was the better package, but like you said I guess thats in terms of animation.
its very much a personal preference. there’s free learning editions of just about every package out there, so try them all and see what fits you best.
Xsi is meant to have a great poly toolset. Other options are wings, modo, silo. Then you have other apps that aren’t advertisted specifically for their modelling toolkit, but who knows, they might work great for you, like c4d, houdini, truespace…
Having good learning material is a big influence too, either with the internal docs, or simply by having a friend who’s really familiar with a piece of software.
Don’t get caught up in ‘max is better!/maya is better!’ hype, it all gets a little religious and silly. Pretty much every package out there can create great models, just as much as awful models. A browse of the cgtalk forums will quickly prove that. Hell, not even zbrush can save some people there. 
Yeah silo is great for making base meshes… also its cheap and not bloated with stuff you can’t even learn if you had 5 lifetimes 
of what i’ve heard from several forums is that with Cinema4D’s newest release they’re now up in the realm as max and maya, however if you havn’t gotten into max yet, wait til max8 comes out, cause they’re incorporated a whole new unwrapping system thats extremely easy to use.
but like he said its all about personal preference, but as far as i know and heard maya is a great starting point as well as max
Max8?
It’s max 7 with all the pluggins that most of the people bought anyway.
I have recently came from Max to XSI and I can tell you that it rocks.
Why? Two words: Production pipeline.
Maya is very similar in many ways to XSI but I still preffer the Softimage tools.