Well I went ahead and upgraded to C5 Pro. Carrara ROCKS!! The new additions to the modeler are welcome. I can actually get some stuff out of it now. I was planning to continue to use LW to model and render in Carrara. Now I am not sure. Looks as if Carrara can easily handle my needs now. The manipulators are very helpful in moving and positioning objects. Before I always ended up grabbing the wrong item, especially in the VM. I think they grabbed the most useful stuff from Hexagon. Obviously they couldnt include it all. But for my modeling needs they got it right and what is included is very welcome. The surface replicator works great. Volumetric clouds do as well. They are simply beautiful. I also like the new design of the texturing room. Much more logical it seems and the filtering of simple shaders works great to reduce clutter on the screen. Lightwave import works great as long as I make sure and import with the same smoothing settings as Lightwave. Around 89.53 if I remember correctly. Displacement mapping works great also. I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, if you skipped the C4 upgrade, you owe it to yourself to get in on this update. Even the standard update at $99 offers a lot. Quite a few of the C4Pro features are in C5 Standard. Including sound and Lightwave import. I remain impressed with Carrara's GI implementation. Shonner's recent Kitchen images are testament to the GI solution in Carrara. OPEN GL performance is noticably better on my system now. At the risk of sounding like an advertisement I will say that if you are already comfortable with Carrara, this upgrade is a no brainer. Assuming you can swing it financially. There have been times over the past 2 years that I could have used the Volumetric clouds. That alone could have easily enhanced several animations I did for a local company. The effect is good enough that I could have easily charged more on those animations. Ok, as you can tell I really like this upgrade. Best of luck to those trying to decide. Hopefully once a demo is released those trying to decide can make a more informed decision. I know after paying for the upgrade and I was waiting for the download to finish there were some moments where I thought to myself that I may have made a mistake. A few minutes in the modeler and those thoughts went away. Now a disclaimer. Yes I use Lightwave. I have used it for several years going back to version 5.6. Realistically there isnt much you cant do with it. However, for my own needs Carrara "now" works quite nicely. I say "now" because before I just could not get my head into the modeling process within the VM. Also, "my needs" might be quite different from someone else's. 85% of my work is animated logo's for local TV advertisers and some corporate ID work. Carrara has always had great looking output, now I feel comfortable modeling in it also. The other 15% of my work is a mix of landscape and architectural rendering. Also, keep in mind I do not rely on this to eat. I have a "regular" job. This is all freelance, although it is on a fairly regular basis. I like the direction Carrara is heading. I also like the program itself. It is a pleasure to work with--keeping in mind what I use it for of course. I wanted to make this switch last year when I bought C3 Studio. But I could never implement C3 in my work because of difficulties I had in the VM. I know others have produced great work in the old VM. I was not one of them. Right now I am using Lightwave 7.5. For me to upgrade now would be $399. There are some nice features in the latest upgrade. I would also get a "free" upgrade to Version 9 when it is released. I guess my heart just isnt in it because I am not excited at all about upgrading Lightwave. Especially for $399 a pop each time. Actually that is not bad considering what the upgrades cost in the past. But when I think about the lack of multiple undo's in Layout that have existed since the program came out it bothers me. I can and do get by without multiple undo's, but what bothers me is that the developers failed to listen to customers for so many years on such a universally accepted standard. Perhaps that all will change soon. But for me personally I think I will go with Carrara for now. I dont see it being a problem for my work. But if it ends up being that way, well I still have LW7.5 to fall back on. I made this statement last year, but back then I thought I "could" get into the modeler, but that didnt happen. Although I did do one job with it that paid for the software. With this upgrade, the modeler works as well as I need it to already. Again, I am not a "power" user by any stretch of the imagination. But if do "grow" in my work, well there is always Hexagon, which I am also quite pleased with, based on the 1.2 demo. Ok, sorry for the long post. But I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts. Cheers!!