Maya, Softimage, Modo, 3dStudioMax, Lightwave are just a few of the professional programs.

There are dozens more consumer programs.

Just google 3d animation/modeling software.

For making 3D models, there are many 3D programs. Some of the popular ones are 3Ds Max, Maya, Zbrush, Mudbox, MODO, and Blender. Out of these programs which I have listed some of them are modeling programs (means you have to deals with the polygons in order to create your 3D models.) and some of them are sculpting programs such as Zbrush and Mudbox (means you have to do digital sculpting for creating models).

For adding texturing, there are basically done in the 3D programs which I have listed above. But if you are talking about creating textures then it is quite a different thing. There are several ways for creating textures for your 3D models:

1. Polypainitng: In this method, the textures are directly painted on to 3D models. For this, artist can use reference & paint that textures directly onto models, or paint from their imagination. Programs like Zbrush, Mudbox and MODO provide this kind of feature.

2. UV Unwrapping: Well, in this method, they create UV image (a flat image of a 3D model which have U and V coordinates) and export them into an image editing programs such as Photoshop or GIMP for creating textures. After that they create several other images such as Normal Map, Specular Map and Displacement Map for adding details to your models so that they look realistic instead of a flat model. These maps are created by baking the details from your high Polygons models.

Note: The above programs are expensive except Blender and GIMP if you can manage get anyone of it.

Blender and GIMP are free. Blender is consider as the best alternative to other 3D programs. It is fully loaded with the tools for modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging animation, physics simulations, video editing, compositing, rotoscoping and camera tracking. Here is a link to its official site for downloading Blender if you want to get into 3D:

http://www.blender.org/

Blender Free Video Tutorials Link:

http://www.blender.org/support/tutorials...

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2....

Blender Manual Link:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2....

Here is a Blender Official YouTube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderFoun...

Here, you can find list of short movies which are created with Blender only.

GIMP official site for downloading:

http://www.gimp.org/

Pov-ray is a good one for textured and ray-traced images.

At the other end there are things like OpenSCAD which produces simple 3D images & models.

Pov-ray example images below:

http://hof.povray.org/images/glasses.jpg

http://www.bugman123.com/Renderings/Fact...

http://oz.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/1998-1...

http://hof.povray.org/images/famille_jou...

pov-ray itself is a renderer, the input is text files.

There are a number of CAD style front end program that allow model creation, eg.

http://www.stmuc.com/moray/

http://www.bishop3d.com/

And conversions from other modellers such as Poser:

https://sites.google.com/site/poseray/

Edit - a better set of examples with info on how they were created:

http://hof.povray.org/

There are loads. I use Blender 3D (because it's free) but there is also Cinema 4D and Autodesk. Your picture there could be made with any.

I specifically use Autodesk products for this. They are the best.

I'm into graphic design and things like that, but I'am never sure what programs are used for what. Heres and example of something I saw and wondered how it was made http://rog.asus.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Strix-owl-image.jpg

Anyone Know?

Any answers will be appreciated

Thanks