3ds Max (Autodesk), originally called 3D Studio MAX, is one of the most widely-used off the shelf 3D animation program by content creation professionals. It has strong modeling capabilities, a flexible plugin architecture and a long heritage on the Microsoft Windows platform. It is mostly used by video game developers, TV commercial studios and architectural visualization studios. It is also used for movie effects and movie pre-visualization. With its price of around $3500 USD, it is one of the more expensive products in the market for this type of work.
Great tool. Many tutorials are out there and the user base is huge meaning you can normally get answers to your problems on forums in no time. There are many free plugins for this prog which is a bonus as the cost is huge for an indie dev company. Still my number one prog after many many years.