There are at least two other applications you should consider, Cinema 4D Go and trueSpace. Cinema 4D is put out by Maxxon, a British company. It is not that well known in the US but is highly regarded in Europe. I've been using Carrara because I already had Raydream and was able to get a good upgrade price but all things considered I would go with Cinema 4D. Functionally they are almost equivalent but Cinema 4D probably has just a little bit more. For instance, Cinema provides a far greater number of primitives and comes with a scripting language. Also, Maxxon has a high-end package, Cinema XL, and if you get more serious with all this you could probably get some kind of decent upgrade price. TrueSpace is a completely different ball of wax. It's interface is completely different from Carrara, I hate it personally, but from a strict functional perspective it is clearly superior to Carrara. Among other things it possesses metanurbs modeling, radiosity rendering and a scripting language based on Python. Also, bizarrely enough, it is better at making at making props for poser, morph targets in particular. You can download demos for both of these products and I strongly recommend that you do. To a certain extend functionality is secondary to ease of use which is largely a personal matter. Like I said I think the interface to trueSpace is from hunger, but lots of users swear by it. Only you can tell. There are also a number of free and shareware programs such as sPatch. They are certainly nowhere near as powerful as the applications mentioned above. But if you are just starting out it's a cheap way to learn some basics and in the process get a better idea of what you really need.