Wolf359.... I am intrested in both modeling and animation. I am seriously looking at the XL package - which if I understand it correctly, is the base package with a bunch of the "separate" functions you described. Explosions are important as is hair/cloth. But I also want to model and have ease of use as well as fast render time. Also i'd like standard movie file output (AVI etc) for post production . How different are the modeling tools? Have you reviewed the cinema r8 options? I guess basically I want to know if a fully loaded cinema system would be as good as lightwave. I don't know of I care about direct poser import anymore. If I can get daz models into either product with a little work that's ok. Plus I am sure someone may have already put together a project file that has victoria with a skeleton built by now.