[rwhunt99]

The first thing is deciding on what you plan to do in 3D- a career, hobby, or maybe use it sparingly as part of your current occupation.

Lightwave is great right out of the box because it's cheap and powerful with a great community of users willing to help out. there is a lot of free plugin tools to expand the envelope, as a serious user or hobbyist, it's a great way to go. However;If you are planning on a career you might want to spend more money, time, and effort with Maya. There seems to be more studios that go with Maya for the heavy duty stuff, I,m sure you'll get arguments either way, that's because people are very passionate about the software they use and rightly so because they invest so much time and effort into their application.

I don't know if that helped much, but play around with each app's learning or discovery editions which are usually free before you dispense with the big payouts.