Part of the problem is that the manual just tells you about the features and what they do. When creating a model you have many, many ways to accomplish the same effect, each with its' own advantage. The best thing to do is to load some of the "Free Models" that you bought on the content sampler, open them up, ungroup the parts & "jump-in" on them to see how they were created in there respective modelers. If you are completely new to 3D & Carrara know that Carrara was formerly known as Ray Dream Studio. Almost all the tutorials for that program will pertain to Carrara. There are some name chages (like Free Form Modeler now is Spline Modeler) and the shaders are fairly different. Other then that, spend a couple weeks looking through the links below. Here's about 30 tuts (some dead):http://members.xoom.com/raydreamer/ More here:http://www.3dcafe.com/asp/tutorial.asp And:http://members.xoom.com/RDSO/tutorials.htm Then ther is:http://diralg.com/ Also check:http://www.3dlinks.com/tutorials_raydream.cfm