I use Bryce at the moment and my foray into Vue 5 has been short, expensive and rather tragic (lots of crashes). To put the question in context, I've not used Carrara before. I'm looking for a product with better Poser support and better lighting (radiosity etc), but I'm unsure if I would require the Carrara Pro version (which is somewhat more expensive). I'm just downloading the trial version (which is Pro) so I'd be interested in what you veterans might have to say.

I use Carrara Pro for professional use. Given it's cost compared to other aps, I'd go ahead and get the Pro version if I were you. After you get the first full versions, upgrades are pretty cheap, so given what you get for your money, the inital investment will be well worth it and you will have an extremely robust, full featured ap at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives.

If you're looking to work with Poser, you'd have to buy the poser transport plugin if you went with standard, so you might as well go ahead and get the Pro version that includes the poser plug-in plus the other features of Pro.You might want to consider Hexagon as well if you do much modeling yourself.

The spline modeler in Carrara is pretty good. Although the latest verison offers a much improved vertex modeler, I still don't care that much for it. Hexagon is a great low cost modler.

Thanks for the info. I recently took advantage of the DAZ promotion and bought Hexagon and I've been quite impressed. It got me thinking about Carrara.

GrantH has offer very good advice. In contrast though, I like the Vertex Modeler a lot now. I do not do a lot of character modeling though. If that were the case I think I might augment it with Hexagon. To put it another way, the VM is now good enough that I can get results quickly and easyily. Something that didnt happen with C3 Studio--for me. I have seen great work with the original VM, just none by me. ;) But now I really like it. Although I still prefer the workflow in Lightwave's Modeler. Mainly for the layers functions. No need to hide selections, just place them on another layer. Very useful feature. Anyway, I guarantee you will be impressed with the rendering in Carrara. Even without using Global Illumination the output is very good. Good luck.