Creatures Caves

The creatures series was made in a variety of 3D applications. I spoke with the artists years ago.

A lot of C2 was made in Lightwave (specifically, the aforementioned C2 tomato launcher toy), but I wouldn't recommend Lightwave!! Development on it has stagnated for years. It's not even competition to modern applications. Most of it's veteran development staff went off to make Modo, it's competitor, and spiritual successor. Modo has active development and is much more robust. It also has a decent pricing scheme for indie artists.

Maya was used for modeling the C1 (yes, those C1 norn renders were Maya in 1996!) and C3 norns and parts of C3's backgrounds. Other parts of C3, and almost all of DS, were made in 3Ds Max.

3Ds Max is also what I used to make all my assets (Canopy, C22DS additions, Garbage Dump, Norn renders, etc). However... 3Ds Max is incredibly expensive. I cannot recommend it unless you're actually in the graphics industry or can leverage a discount somehow. They have no competitive pricing option for hobbyists.

If you're wealthy and need to flush some cash, Max and Maya are the industry standard. Max is used significantly in games, and Maya for cinema (Pixar is a major studio that comes to mind). Have only a little cash to blow and still want something commercial? Modo is a solid app.

Honorary mention goes to Houdini. Historically used as a VFX application, it is becoming a powerful procedural modeler. Everyone in the GFX industry should keep an eye on Houdini!

No money? Well let's talk about the elephant in the room: Blender. It's open source, feature rich, and not nearly as confusing to learn as it used to be. It's most recent versions have fixed it's infamous UI and brought it on-par with commercial applications. In some ways I believe it surpasses them. Blender is becoming more popular in the industry (particularly Indie development for obvious reasons), and I see it becoming a pipeline staple in coming years.

My suggestion is Blender. You can't go wrong with it, and it's free. But if you've never done 3D work before, don't expect to be cranking out metaroom backgrounds overnight. 3D Modeling is a skill and there are a lot of principles, tools, and lingo to understand before you'll get results.

The truth is, the application is irrelevant. A skilled artist can use Max, Maya, Modo, Houdini, or Blender, and get the same, outstanding results. My advice is to get Blender, get learning, and get modeling. If you want to switch apps later, it won't be as hard as you think. The application is not as important as the foundation.

Hope this helps!