CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I'm gonna make myself do it finally. Any tips or tricks? I have G-max, and will be getting a copy of... Maya? (I just realised I have never seen it written...) Or you can just yell at me to get off of here and just do it.

Maya is not the kind of program which most people can just pick up and use. The first thing you'd want to search is poly modeling.

However, you can also use this as a good reference site for tutorials.

3dTotal.com - Free stuff - Tutorials - Maya

And there you go, lots of stuff for beginners and such.

I have a question about 3D modeling as well. Has anyone ever used Blender before, and if so, what purposes would you recommend it for? I've known about it for a few years, but have been too intimidated to actually pick it up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcBECFLXmuc

That was made with blender. Take your pic of the purposes it was used for in that film.

Rusty Claymore-
As Jaden has said, tutorials are helpful. Familiarity with the program's interface is the first big step. Once you feel confident it just takes practice
Extrusion modeling is a good technique to start with (actually that's all I use right now).

RidleyofZebes-
Blender is awesome!!!
You will beat yourself up over the counterintuitive interface for a good while, but after that it makes perfect sense.
It has a lot of powerful features, unfortunately I'm too lazy to do much past basic stuff. Getting a background reference image set to use for extrusion modeling works pretty well. Then it's on to the texture mapping and animation.