"And I agree with everyone who feels that we don't have to denigrate one product just to make another look better. I'm sure that D/S will have many desirable features, which is why I look forward to trying it." I agree 100%. "kuroyume0161 you really should study-up on more recent developments in rendering which make dihedral polygon smoothing unnecessary or at least redundant when other methods yield equivalent and possibly superior results." Like anything, there's good and bad aspects to everything. While it might be possible to use micropolygon displacement smoothing to allow lower-poly models to render as well as high poly counts (in both the base mesh and any morph meshes) it also limits what you can actually do regarding rendering engines. Build a very low-poly model that renders well with Firefly, for example, and you're stuck using Firefly to render (no using the P4 engine, or exporting to another program that doesn't have micropolygon displacement smoothing). Build a high-poly model, and you can move it anywhere (or at least almost anywhere). With hardware getting faster and cheaper, the need for super-low poly models isn't as great as it used to be. That's not to say there's not a lot of advantage to being able to use low-poly models either. Depending on them, though, does lower your options come render time. "I'm also leary of OpenGL - its great for fast previews and real-time activities, but the price of that speed often means living with some annoying artifacts." You lost me on this one. None of the 3D programs I own that use OpenGL use it for final renders, only for previews. I'm sure there'll be some problems with somebody's cards or drivers (there always is, regardless of who's making what software) but hopefully they won't be too disasterous. OpenGL previews is one of the things I'm most looking forward to. I figure just being able to actually see where the hair sits, or how and where the clothing falls will save hours a week in set-up time and make a lot of my preview renders unnecessary. Another aspect I'm excited about with DAZ's choice of rendering engine is the possibility of network rendering (using BORG), not only on an animation but the chance of using multiple machines on my home network to render a single large pict (last time I could do that cheaply was with Infini-D). If it works, that could be another huge timesaver. I'm also hoping we'll see batch processing eventually as well, but haven't seen any hint of it yet. I'm certainly not expecting perfection first time out of the gate, but I'm not expecting a total disaster either. I've used Poser since beta testing for version 1.0, and I don't see wiping it from my drive in the next few months. I am excited, though, of the new possibilities on our doorstep. I expect to use both programs for the forseeable future. -- Walt Sterdan, Freelance