Carrara is not a perfect application. However, if you find one, let me know! ;) I use it everyday professionally for still and animation work and find it quite reliable and stable. It's feature set is robust and it's render speed and quality is very good. For it's price, it's tough to beat. And, like any good program with many features, you have to take time to learn it thoroughly to be able to fully utilize it's many capabilities. I do use other modelers such as Poser, Bryce, Amapi and Vue (comes tomorrow) but largely use Carrara for most of my professional needs.You can do almost anything with it, especially utilizing the many and inexpensive plug-ins availiable for it. That said, if you are going to move to high-end animation a la Hollywood style, you will eventually need a Maya, Lightwave or something like that. They simply do some things that you cannot do with Carrara. However, Carrara is an excellent starting point for learning how craft animations easily and end up with some pretty impressive results. Additionally, many of the things that the high-end packages did exclusivly a couple of years ago are now becoming availiable in less expensive products like Carrara. If I ever finally get my website updated (it's been like 8 months beyond where I thought I'd have time to overhaul it) there will be quite a few animation samples made with Carrara for clients in addition to the illustration work I do. www.markbremmer.com Regards, Mark