3DS Max

pros use maya and 3ds max. its about half and half... well slightly leaning toward 3ds max but both are very widely used.

I heard that Maya is more widely used in the film industry? There is also the choice of SoftImage XSI.

Do you need to be good at drawing to learn these programs or can I simply use other people's drawings.

Max generally seems to get more use, but that might be changing. There's a lot of annoying issues with Max, particularly on the programmer side. XSI is getting to be a lot more popular (and there's a free version that exports useful files, yay!), as is Maya. There are still niches for things like Lightwave, though they don't seem to get much attention overall.