For what Carrara does, you can't beat the price. Very good render engine that is fast. I'm fairly new to Amapi but am really liking it a bunch for vertex modeling. From an earlier post, someone indicated that they actually preferred the Amapi modeler to the LW modeler because it has more effective tools, i.e. several processes that took multiple steps in LW could be done with a single tool in Amapi. Amapi does have a learning curve associated with the interface. Mark