If you wan't to learn Lightwave then one of the greatest books is Dan Ablan's Inside Lightwave 7 book. I wasn't too comfortable with LW 7's modeler and after doing a few of the tutorials I was on my way to become a pretty good LW modeler! You can check it out at amazon.com . But if your stuck on Bryce then not much can change your mind other than the fact that uh... Lightwave's modeler kicks butt once you get the hang of it. Trust me, you don't see any Lightwave modelers out there saying they wish they could learn the bryce modeler. If you already have Lightwave then it would help you out in the long run to learn it instead of bryce.

quote "The best way to go (and not as expensive as 3dsm) is to use an extra modeler (e.g. rhino) and a good renderer (cinema4D, lightwave, flamingo as a rhinoplugin)" If you have Lightwave then there is no need to use Rhino because Lightwave already has one of the best modeling engines around. A few people do use Rhino for modeling and Lightwave for rendering but that's just because they already knew how to use Rhino and didnt take the time to learn Lightwave's modeler.