Several factors I haven't seen covered... Vue and Bryce have a great reputation for creating landscapes. That's great, that's their focus. However, are you primarily going to be doing outside scenes - or - are you going to be doing room interiors, city streets, spacecraft scenes or the interior of temples? The other packages are probably going to be better - especially if you want to create your own starship bridge or Temple. Are you wanting to import Poser animations into your scenes? if so, Lightwave is the one on the list that can't do it easily. You can import still figures, rig and animate them in Lightwave (using 3rd party plugins), but you can't import the fully animated scenes. I'm still using Poser Pro pack and Lightwave 6.5 because that was the last generation of the two that played well together.

Before they made me they broke the mold!
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