Thanks danamo. Wings is "clunky feeling" and does not have near as many tools and options. The box modeling is somewhat similar compared to Hex 1, but won't compare at all to version 2 of Hex, which will be more comparible to Zbrush as far as modeling goes.

Tonytrout on the Eovia forum for Hexagon just gave me an excellent way to make sure the points I want to weld are on top of each other. "You get the head nice and square facing you in orthographic view, select all the points on the join, and then in the object properties window set the SIZE to 0 (zero) on the axis perpendicular to the plane,(Hint: you have three (XY orZ) axis to choose from, the right axis to adjust to 0 is usually the one that has the smallest number in ) This lines up all the points, when you duplicate and weld the points are identical and weld. The beauty of this method is that you can accurately join the two halfs even after the centre line ponts have been messed around with. No matter how careful you are especially if you are using soft selections ,the centre line points always seem to get off centre."

I've tried it with the seperation much closer, however I just now got it to work by fiddling until 90% of the points joined. I then used the weld tool to clean up the unwelded points. It is not the most intuitive tool but it does work. I should have joined the halves before I extruded the throat. I think my face had to much complexity along the seams.

I was a long time Ray Dream user, versions 4, 5 & 5.5. I purchased Carrara 1 when it came out, but was put off by the non standard interface, so until recently, continued to use RD 5.5 on my Athlon 2600+, 1 gig ram, XP and nVidia geforce card. I recently gave it away to someone getting started in 3D, as I bought Carrara 3 on EBay for under $40 and loved it so much I upgraded to version 5 a month later. RDS 5.5 ran fine in XP, but I have an nVidia card, so I think the problem is your graphics card. If you don't have Carrara I suggest you check EBay. They usually have 3 or 4 new in the box version 3s for sale, average price: $38.00. You can then upgrade to version 5 at Eovia if you like.

Thanks, I did.

Thanks for the clarification. Think I'll keep the Amapi Designer, it was cheap "new old stock" on EBay, and learn it as well. I am finding modeling non-organic in Hex more dificult than characters, which Hex seems ideal for.