I think Carrara has more ability landscape or otherwise. It's an awesome renderer. The thing to do is start with small tutorials. It's alot to take on at once. I am new to Carrara and Hex, but love them both. I don't try to do some grand imagery, right now,  altho I keep images in my head like an artist would, but right now I am trying to learn a relative mastery and comfort with the tools. eovia3d.net (as well as many other places) has some great tutorials aimed at simple modeling items. Yeah corel has some great stuff, but they do weird things with products they buy...usually kill them. There is so much they could have done with photopaint and didn't, not to mention a long list of others. They have the opposite of the midas touch. :biggrin:  Adobe makes good stuff, but like Macromedia they don't try too hard. You pay way too much and get basically a bug fix. Then they assume you are a thief. I have had companies tell you the problems they went thru with Adobe when employees registered software they did not know was tied to a specific email address. Adobe made them cough up a paper trail to show the employees didn't own the sw, but the company. That may get worse now that Adobe has bought Macromedia we will see. I think healthy competition is a good thing not a fan of giant global corporations.

No need to think outside the box....
    Just make it invisible.