Hi NightCabbage, well Modo does has a kind of more sophisticated renderer than Carrara, so if for example you are going to be producing renderings professionally and need to do them on a tight schedule so that things like quick render speed is very important, then that could be a good investment.

However, if you're not going to be producing renderings on some kind of deadline or tight timetable, then I don't see why you wouldn't want to try Carrara 7 first, it does have a lot of capabilities so you can produce nice quality renderings with it.

But I guess in order to answer your question more fully you would need to give some more information about what you are going to be doing with these renderings.

For example, are you producing product brochures? Or are you doing animations? Or do you possibly just want to do some creative visualization?

Anyway, the more information about what your particular goals are would definitely help for giving advice.

For example if you are going to be working on producing a feature film, the advice of what renderer you will want to work with would be different than if you want to make some simple stills.

- Michael