forgot to add, the Carrara shaders I use are entirely procedural. I don't use texture maps for the Carrara renders, rather I have developed shaders that use no texture maps (the models in that image aren't even uvmapped), I make renders in Carrara to use as texture maps in Poser, as P4 does not do refraction. Spent quite a while figuring out a decent gemstone shader. You can do similar things in highend rendering packages, just not in most of the lowend apps, not even in Poser 5 (no fresnel or caustics). Which is why I bought Carrara... has a lot of high end features for a lowend price.