The advise regarding demos is very good. I use Lightwave and find it to be absolutely awesome, and have never regretted shelling out for it. I was new to 3d when I got it early last summer, just after getting Poser. I found the program very intimidating at first, so many options for everything. I remember thinking "Holy S**t, what have I gotten myself into?" After making the commitment to dive in, I got a couple of good books filled with lessons and began to understand how to use it. The only reason the learning curve is steep is because it is seemingly unlimited in what it can do. Fantastic modeler (it, not me yet) unbelievable cloth dynamics, collision detection, hypervoxels, particle generators, compositing, on and on and on. More stable than solitaire, and with a renderer that is so fast and accurate that you'll swear that someone is doing the calculations by hand when you use Poser. It's not really the learning curve that's steep, it's the infinite list of things that it can do that's hard to get your head around.