so you would not be able to use something like open GL or a rendering engine like Firefly without paying for licensing of the technology. OpenGL does not cost any licensing fees for application developers: http://www.opengl.org/developers/license/license.html Using FireFly in external programs will be close to impossible without help from either CL or Pixels. But you could use rendering engines like Aqsis that don't cost any fees but require you to publish your source code under the GPL. If you are interested in 3D software development, I'd recommend giving http://www.blender.org/ a visit. This is a fairly advanced 3D application that is under an open source license for a while now (it used to be commercial). They are always looking for new coders. you are talking about a two to five year process before you can have a viable program to be worthy of use or competition to an existing program like Poser Just take a look at how long it is taking DAZ to implement a subset of Poser 4's features for their Studio app.