Excellent overall advise! I agree, demos are the best way to determine which tool you take to best... another route you might want to take is to jump in to the application galleries here and try sorting by genre. Like try entering a gallery like: Topic = LightWave and Genre = Science Fiction. This should give you a pretty good idea of what can be achieved with that particular application. You'll be able to narrow it down further by jumping into the application forums and meet your fellow artists. Sometimes a forum will have a tremendous online resource of links and tutorials... and sometimes the forum regulars themselves are the resources. :o) Cheers! M

Mind Over Matter
"If you don't mind, then it don't matter."