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.

Core i7 950@3.02GHz | 12GB Corsair Dominator Ram@1600mHz | 2GB Geforce GTX 660

Lightwave | Blender | Marmoset | GIMP | Krita