Ok, Im searching for a CG software for hobby use.

Right now, I am leaning towards LW.

However Blender has sparked my imagination.

Other than the cost, what are the basic differences between the two?

Id rather hear unbiasis opinions than 'Use it dude! Its free!'

Thanks!

This is kind of asking 'How long is a piece of string' with just as many answers. The answer really is down to you in the sense that you will need to find the program that suits you and your way of working. If possible, download trial versions of those that your interested in and see which one you find most comfortable working with. As far as Blender goes, the interface is daunting on first look but if you persevere with it, you will find it can do pretty much anything that other pay for programs can do. personally, I have Max, Bryce, Wings, Vue and Blender, but my program of choice remains Blender as I can work faster than in the others. (This could be because I havn't learnt the others as well of course). As always it's down to personal choice.

10 years ago lw was the cream now its blender. Thats my simple anwser.

Blender is free and it does have a few books available for learning it now.  The interface is known for being difficult and non-intuitive so basic navigation skill will need to be schooled.

Lightwave on the other hand is not free and will take a bite of several hundred dollars even with discount offers.  It has an enormous amount of books, videos, tutorials, etc for learning it because it has been around since computer generated 3D started.  Its interface is known for being easy and very intuitive due to its text based icons.

So the short of it is how much money are you willing to spend?  If you don't have the bucks then Blender is the most obvious choice.  If you have some money to spend that Lightwave would be easier to learn and feature packed.  Remember that the learning material isn't free either and you can spend several hundred dollars on that also.  The advantage is that it is available.  Also, if you do go the Lightwave route then Blender can compliment it so I would say get both; the cost would be the same.  So, the questions isn't  which one Lightwave or Blender but rather Lightwave and Blender or Blender alone.  The choice is yours...

Money is not a issue.

Well, its a issue for Maya and such. LOL

I have read through several Blender tutorials and the Wiki-book 'noob to pro'.

Basically without involving cost, is Blender as 'featured pack' as LW?

Also I want to purchase Vue 6.5 Infinite and Poser 7. Does Blender support this two or better yet does these two support Blender?

I don't know about Blender integration but those two will work in Lightwave.  Not sure about the Vue but the Poser will require another third party purchase to integrate with LW.

Quote - ... Also I want to purchase Vue 6.5 Infinite and Poser 7. Does Blender support this two or better yet does these two support Blender?

I create content (3D models) in Blender 3D, export them to Wavefront obj files, which import nicely into Poser 7, no dramas. Here's a sailboat model I put together in Blender - it's not done yet, but I kinda wanted to check the size and all:

...had no problem bringing it into Poser 7.

Poser 7 does not read .blend files, nor does Blender read .pz3 files, but both handle .obj files fine.
Don't have Vue 6.5 so I can't say anything about that....

I think the truth of it is you pick a 3d program as a personal thing, you really need to play with them for a decent amount of time to see which work flows suit you best. I love 3ds max, hate maya, C4d has great modelling but rubbish textures, but all in my personal opinion, other folk love these packages and produce far better works then I do in any of them :).

I've never tried lightwave, but I've used blender,  truespace, Bryce, 3ds Max, XSI and Cinema 4d over the years. Currently I use Blender, as others have said the interface took a little getting used to, but I remember the same thing when I started using Max.

I used bryce and truespace when I first started getting into 3d. I then got to learn 3ds max when I started work in a fast proto-typing team. Given that I am no longer doing 3d in that professional role, I can't justify the cost of upgrading Max from 3.1 (basically it's so old I would have to buy new).

I spent quite a while comparing different package to decide what to move to (allowing me to use newer Lighting techniques - GI, Metropolis Transforms and so on).  XSI, Cinema, Maya where all trialled on my machine and Blender. I spent at least 3 weeks with each package, the ones I liked the most were XSI and Blender. The deciding facter that swayed me to blender were 2 things, a) cost and b) hair/fur is better in blender then in XSI foundation. moving up to a more expensive version of XSI or buying  a plug in would have resolved the latter (leap frogging over blender), but the cost bit for me was persuasive.

As a side note I tend to use Indigo as my main renderer lately  - been doing some architectural work and it's fantastic.

Quote - Basically without involving cost, is Blender as 'featured pack' as LW?

Well, what features are you looking for?  I'm not terribly familiar with Lightwave's features myself, but if you tell us what you want out of a 3d package we might be able to help you there. 

Blender really does have a lot of the features of some of the high-end packages out there, though, and it's constantly improving.  If you want an example of stuff blender can do when pushed to its fullest, check out the open movie projects:
http://www.elephantsdream.org/
http://peach.blender.org/

Well, I want to create scenes such as natural landscape and such and maybe do some modeling and then animations.

I guess its hard to explain since I have never done any computer graphics work. My skills are in using CADD.

I think I am going to go with Blender.

Thanks for all the input.

Gotta go download it now.

Once you've downloaded it, you might also want to check out the links in this thread:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2733873

As people have mentioned, the interface can be a little hard to get the hang of.

Quote - Well, I want to create scenes such as natural landscape and such and maybe do some modeling and then animations.

Blender can do good grass and I think there's a landscape generator script out there somewhere.  I think you can get Vue trees into blender, but they'll be static meshes, so they won't animate easily in blender like they will in vue.  I'm not sure there's anything for generating trees in blender itself that will--but if anyone else here knows of one I'd love to hear about it!  Probably easier to go from blender into vue if you want landscapes, if you're planning on getting vue anyway.

The ANT landscape generator plugin isn't too bad.

http://blenderscriptstorage.googlepages.com/ANTLandscape104a_9Sept2006.zip

don't know of anything to generate tree native in blender, but for tree gens that can then be imported there are Dryad, Arbaro and POVtree. Dryad is pretty cool but I've had issues with opengl on some machines (like my laptop - the intel graphics don't do gl very well :( ).

I haven't used dryad before, I'll have to look at it.  Arbaro is pretty good too.  There are also things like ivy generator and plant studio.

http://dryad.stanford.edu/

:)

Hey Raz, sorry I didn't comment earlier I'd meant to, but got busy with a project and forgot. :-/

I'm a LightWave user, and its a fantastic program, it did fall behind the curve in a few areas for awhile it would seem, but its getting better with every update. With LW, you get what may be the best "out of the box" render engines, and if you want to shell out some extra cash, you can pick up FPrime, which is by far one of the fastest render engines on the market. LW also has one of the better modeling applications out there.

Blender's also a fantastic application, and again, its growing more feature-full and better with every update. Blender has slightly better fur/hair fx, better native UV mapping tools, and better particle fx than LW does out of the box, at least at the moment, the current beta of LW appears to address the hair/fur tools as well as the UV tools.

One of the biggest things that Blender has that LW doesn't have is a sculpting mode, a-la ZBrush/Mudbox. Blender also allows you to paint on your mesh much the way you would in either of those applications or one like BodyPaint.

Truthfully, there's not really a whole lot of differences in what you can accomplish with them, you could create pretty much the same project in both. Tho you'd have to go about certain elements of it slightly differently in each, the end result shouldn't end up wholly different I wouldn't think.

Personally, I do all my modeling and rendering in LW, because that's what I'm most proficient with, but I've started to supplement it with Blender for things like sculpting. With the exceptions of a couple minor hang ups, the two work pretty well together, and I plan to learn Blender more in depth so I can further integrate it into my workflow.

As far as my recommendation, I'd do exactly what you did, and get Blender. Hey its free, you certainly can't beat the price tag, nothing wagered, nothing lost. Take a good hard look at it, use it for awhile see if you like it. Blender's interface, while there's nothing terribly wrong with it, does have a really steep learning curve, but it will pay off once you do learn it. If you don't like Blender or just can't get used to it, then certainly I'd look into LW.

I do want to dispel one myth about Blender tho, its been one of my pet peeves for awhile; Ignore anyone that says, "Blender is the fastest app to work in once you learn it," that's not true, any application is going to be fast when you're proficient with it and its hotkeys. The difference between Blender and some of the other apps, is that Blender forces you to learn the hotkeys, other apps give you buttons to click on, either with cryptic pictures [Maya,Max], or with words [LightWave] and don't necessarily encourage you to learn the hotkeys. If you do take the initiative to learn those hotkeys , you can accomplish things just as fast in those apps.

The single strongest point going to Lightwave as the first tool of choice as a 3D application to learn is the sheer amount to training material available.  What is Inside Lightwave; somewhere around 750 pages and comes was a DVD just to name one of like 15 books available.

I chose LW due to price and the interface, but thats me.
There should be a demo version of LW or for that mater all the major 3d apps, download em and try till you find one you like (or loath the least).

I think most people use a variety of programs for different tasks and not just one. I use:

Blender: modeling and some UV mapping
Poser: scene setup
Povray: rendering

Raz If you want to try Lightwave 9 out there is a trial here http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/lwtrial/
I would suggest you try them yourself any input from us will be biased because we have our own styles and expectations on how things should be. 

As a LW and Blender (and Vue) user I agree with what everyone has said, especially Warlock. My suggestion is give Blender a try for a few months. Don't try anything else and concentrate on really learning it. Then if you feel like you can't do what you want then try the LW demo. Both are excellent programs, but if landscapes are truly what you want to do then I would check out the book "Creating 3D worlds" by Simon Danaher. It is an excellent book that explains the differences between all-around apps (like LW and Blender) and specific ones like Vue.
If all you want to do is landscapes I would just get Vue. There is a demo of Vue 6 Infinite available too.

Best of luck and remember it is the imagination not the app...take a look at the movie "Big Buck Bunny" - you can find it at CGTalk in the Vue forum. Someone posted a link to the movie. It is amazing. Great style and quality.

Hate to say it, but Cost is very important.
 For me, it's like looking at it as PC vs MAC. Mac is difficukt to upgrade without paying someone else to do it for you. That or buying the new version a few months later. Where a PC is easy to upgrade at a much lower cost.

 Not once has anyone had to pay for a upgraded version of Blender (2.46 just came out). But other 3D programs Lightwave, Bryce, Max, Maya, Rhino, tend to come out with new versions that you must purchase to use. For me, it's Blender and the older (Free) versions of Bryce.

But that's me