I’ve been teaching Maya for the last three years. I have to admit, I do love Maya. It’s an amazing and wonderful piece of software. It consists of four modules—modeling, rendering, dynamics and animation. 
It’s a sophisticated piece of software. Recently, however, my son turned me onto Luxology’s modo. And, you can try it for 30 days for free.
Modo (they always write it with a lowercase “m” but I just can’t make myself do that at the beginning of a sentence) is a terrific 3D modeler with seamless, sophisticated, multi-threaded Paint and Rendering capability built-in. Modo allows you to move between polygon and SubD geometry by simply touching the TAB key. Modo’s UV texture editor is soooooo much easier to use than Maya’s. This is one area where Modo really stomps Maya. The modo Shader Tree is similar to the Shake Shader Tree—both are dynamic and easy to modify. And, it renders like nobody’s business.
What I don’t like … no animation. So, everything has to be moved to another application. If I were doing product modeling or character modeling only, I wouldn’t care BUT, since I do want to move things, it gets a bit frustrating. Thus far, moving models into Maya hasn’t proven to be as easy as I’d like it to be but I haven’t given up, yet. More updates as I learn more about how to better integrate these two tools.
I almost forgot to mention, Luxology offers a number of Tutorials and Training Papers.
