Wow, thanks again, all. (I hope I am not robbing you too much of your creative time!)

I think Zonkerman might have a good grasp on at least the dilemma that prompted my question in the first place...not knowing what to try to put a program through it's paces seemed a little difficult to even get started.

I am sure that to all of you experienced in 3D software you could, by now, probably just read a spec sheet and know if what it does will work for you. In my own situation, though, being a good traditional artist, yet a neophyte to the whole 3D world and not just one program, it would have been a lot more daunting to think of even being ABLE to get enough out of a 30 day demo.

So please understand how much I appreciate the guidance here. Of course I mentally went over the prospects of downloading all of the demos, but the "where to start and what to look for (meaning how to gauge)" I was totally deaf, dumb, and blind to.

On the other end of the multimedia spectrum, I have written music for over 20 years and know the audio production software like the back of my hand. (No, not much TV time for me, growing up - too focused on art and music!  :)  ) So when I look at a new program it takes me about 2 seconds for me to figure out its value.

So I guess that word sums it up - value.

WIthout having some kind of input like you all provided here, I could have spent weeks, months, or whatever long not even knowing that Carrara's modeling capabilities weren't as productive as XYZ's...

I am sure after trekking out and becoming familiar with one or two programs it'll all start to make more sense, but like Zonkerman I don't want to spend any more money on something that wouldn't do myself half as good as...(fill in the blank).

And before this thread, I didn't even KNOW about Modo, and holy crap does it look nice!

And maybe another sort-of-technical question, though - do programs render at about the same speed? Obviously I am talking about if the same scene, objects, etc were all there, nothing different about any of them.

Is this what makes a renderer "better"? How fast it does it? Because right now, I can't tell what you actually do as a user but push the "go" button to make it render - meaning that the user's work is generally done at that point.

And is rendering just a product of CPU and RAM, or do any rendering calculations happen in the graphics card, also?

Thanks again, all, and have a super weekend,

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