bluetone is right with the graphs,this would be one of the best features.i saw the animation master graph in a tutorial video about animation,nice little feature and very powerful/helpful.it gives you so much control over your animation. carrara has displacement mapping via the anything grooves plugin.amapi is the best modeling tool around on this planet and i think that the symbols are very clear. cool would be a option to use normal maps in carrara studio. i like the interface,cause i really hate grey and ugly standard interfaces.i like to place the buttons where i want them and that is very well done in carrara.okay,the interface should look a bit more pro like but still with the feeling of carrara. carrara 4 (for example) with a interface like max or maya and i would save my money for lightwave and i would never ever upgrade to 4. i never used the metaball stuff in carrara,cause i dont like to model with metaballs and when i want to do something with them then im using organica(last time when i used metaballs was at the beginning of 2003 when i started with 3d).metaballs are ugly! they could delete this metaball modeling thing and add more options for animation like the graph and other needful things,and of course better particles,particles like truespace 6.6 has.i really hate that the particles dont interact with objects like they should. cheers Dominik