You could try downloading the demo produced by the Moving Picture Co. in London (movingpicturecompany.co.uk) for Gerry Anderson's production company. It is a short (15 minutes) of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, produced as a technology demonstrator and pilot program for the new series of Captain Scarlet that may well be in production at the moment. It uses motion capture, texture mapping, 3D sculptures (faces), 3D vehicles mapped with texture maps and colour contour maps - all in all a pretty impressive demonstration of what it could do.

Although MPC use Maya regularly as their tool of choice, they did do a pretty rigorous evaluation of different packages, including lightwave. I think in the end, Maya came out with the best cross-platform support, best price/performance, best support of acceleration hardware, best software architecture for plug-ins (not 100% sure about this, so don't quote me) and the best generic feature set. They have a white paper of it on their UK website, and they made an article of both the CS pilot production and also the choice of system for the UK graphics mag, CGI. Sorry I can't quote a specific issue, but it was late 99/early 2000. You could check this out on the CGI website (cgimag.com)