I can tell you a little about Lightwave. Lightwave is a pretty awsome program, if it's for special effects such as explosions, laser fire, fire it's self, or if it's for modeling objects such as spaceships (which I've seen mostly done in lightwave) weapons, stuff like house hold item and everything. I guess 3DSMax can pretty much do the same, but I don't know about the effects part. I can tell you this though, lightwave can take some time to learn, and come be very time consuming. Although I agree with tempest, try the demos. I can't speak for 3dSMax, I've never used it before. Yet anyways... The picture I'm showing (if it appears) is an example of an explosion I did. Very easy to make, however the textering part was a pain. It took me about 1-2 hours to texture. (Which sucked a lot when I screwed up and had to start over)Sorry for the small size, I'll try and render a bigger picture. This was made by a tutorial I followed. Greeg72