Me, I started with Ray dream, got into Carrera Carrera has some nice options- it does have once of nicest cartoon renders. However it was too buggy and the interface was so "userfiendly" it got annoying- You know too friendly ti the piont of useless - like several peopel I know in the real world. and when I judged that a dead end, (too buggy) I shopped arround Amapi- Got a free copy of v5 with Carrera. While i did not run into any buggs mentioned here, I found Apami suffers from the overly friendly interface syndrome. I did manage to make soem very nice tubes and shinpads with it. This is what happend when artists program. 3DSMax and Maya- simply too expensive for a hobbiest even at academic pricing. True Space- The demo was simply too buggy. I figured if this is what they trying to sell their product and it chrashes whenever I breath heavily it does not bode well. Besides I never did fgure out thier shaders Cinema 4D what can I say teh moment I starte dteh demo I laphed I cried I think I had an orgasm. I may not be teh best fit for everyone but it sings to me. I found teh interface totally intuitive. Maybe because I have a thing for nuts and bolts germanic logic. Its price US$300 for acedemic pricing was more than I liked to spend but well worth it. What really sold me is that its pretty much unsinkable. Just upgraded to v8 last week. Lightwave- I am thinking about this a next step in a couple years. In fact have teh demo disk right here waiting to be installed. Not sure if its worth it though. Especially after reading soem comments Having said that, I still find myself cranking up Ray Dream for the simplier jobs-especially morphs. Cinema 4d v7 did not inport OBj object in teh correct vertex order but v8 seems to have fixed it. But I'll probably keep RDS on my hard drive. What can i say. you never forget your first love.