Aren't Maya, 3ds max or Lightwave too expensive for just a hobby? I don't see the point of spending $2000 for a program of which I'm only able to use 5% of its features. If you want a modeler to go with Poser, I'd recommend taking a look at Carrara, TrueSpace, Pixels:3D or Blender before spending that much money. And if you want better rendering, learning about FireFly and the material room can be a very good start. There are a lot of unexploited possibilities sleeping in it. But buying Maya just because Poser doesn't have modeling capabilities - that's what I call overkill.