As a Lightwave user for years I can offer my opinion. There are many things that Carrara has that I wish Lightwave had. The plant generator, faster GI and caustics, and numerous others. Also, rendering in general in Carrara to me is much faster than Lightwave. Reflection, transparency and shadows render quicker in my opinion. The interface takes getting used to compared to Lightwave, but its that way when you switch to any application. Lightwave is much more robust with regard to animation capabilities. The spreadsheet function in LW offers a lot of possibilities with regard to modifying many objects or parameters. One thing I like better in Carrara is the integration of the modeler within the program. Lightwave forces you to use a seperate program, but the Modeler and Layout (LW's Assembly) communicate with each other. But I find it much more work friendly to have it all in one app. LW's modeler is much better than Carrara in my opinion, but again remember Lightwave has been around since the early 90's with the video toaster. The booleans in Lightwave are very good compared with Carrara. The Layout application for Lightwave is much better than Carrara with regards to setting up animations and motions. The surfacer is also somewhat more powerful. In Lightwave you can specify a position where a texture or procedural function is placed. This allows easy animation of a moving texture or procedural bump for example. The placement controls are there for each channel and layer. Environment mapping is object dependent rather than scene. So you can have a different environment map for each object and control the angle in which it is projected. There is also builtin displacement mapping that works great. Objects in Layout can also have clip maps applied. this can be done in the surface properties also like Carrara. It achieves similar results doing it at the object level, but it is much quicker to render as opposed to rendering the transparency in the surface. Lightwave also allows "Baking" of radiosity. While in my opinion Carrara's GI soloution is better and quicker. The ability to "Bake" textures is great especially in doing animated walkthroughs of architecture. As long as there are no moving objects during the animation. The radiosity is computed once. Then these textures are applied to the model(s). This greatly cuts down the time need to do Global Illumination walkthroughs. Lightwave also has a much larger community of course. There are tutorials for most anything for Lightwave. Newtek also maintains their own forums and the foums are very active. Having said all that I am very pleased with what Carrara is capable of doing. Especially when you factor in the price point. The latest upgrade for Lightwave cost about as much as Carrara cost me. I have not upgraded yet, since I am satisfied with what LW does already. However, I mentioned this before, if I were a power user, then Carrara might not be as attractive. The aforementioned animation tools and large community are valuable assets. Not to mention Lightwave has free network rendering. Can be tough to get it setup, but it is totally free. Arrays of objects in Modeler and Layout are easy. This is one area where Carrara is severely lacking. Particles in Lightwave are integrated much better also. The addition of HyperVoxels to the particles brings partciles to a new dimension. Lightwave has collision objects too. In Carrara you are limited to the floor. Forces such as rotation and bounce with parameters for friction are also provided. Of course each application has many more features than I touched on here, but these have been the most immediate differences I have noticed. For now, Carrara is capable enough that I want to continue to explore it and get better with it. Eovia has shown a commitment to not only attending to user's requests but also in providing improvements in features that are starting to compare with the big boys. Donnie