Very few of the pre-sets in Carrara will deliver "finished goods" like the explosion you refer to. However, with work, practice and cleverness, you can get it to do a lot. The explosion effect in Carrara simply breaks an obj into polygons and scatters them -- you'd have to add your own glows, smoke, sparks, & fire -- but that's do-able. Frankly, I'm skeptical of a pre-packaged effect that DOESN'T require customizing, since you want to be able to control the look on a per-case basis. Importing Poser animations is the "Holy Grail" plugin around here. I think everyone on this list would jump at it if it existed. Right now, it's all a variety of workarounds, including morph-amations, compositing, and other tricks. I can sympathize; I've got Maya on an SGI workstation at work, and it's a tough transition to work with Carrara on my PC at home, but I'm still very impressed with things it can do for the low price. I wish I had time to work with it more -- I've yet to do anything meaningful or woth posting yet due to workload and time constraints.