I'm relatively new at this 3d thing, and I recently purchased Carrara 1.1 from Purplus.com for $29. I figured that I would practice with it until I had developed some skills, and then maybe buy version 3 and switch without missing a beat. However, the program is so horrendous as to be nearly unusable. Most of the problem seems to center around the vertex modeler. Polygons won't fill, models end up full of unwanted artifacts that I can't edit or delete, converting spline opbjects to vertex objects causes "unknown errors", switching from the assemble room to the vertex modeler causes "unknown errors", boolean operations cause "unknown errors", breathing on it causes "unknown errors", the user's manual is poorly written and the pages are all falling out even though it is only a couple of weeks old, etc.....etc....etc... The only practice I'm getting is practicing not going insane. Are there any other low-end complete modeling/rendering programs other than Bryce? Should I get Carrara 2 or 3 despite my experience with version 1? What have your experiences been with Carrara 2 and/or 3? Thanks!