I use Reiss Studio's Body Studio and 3D Studio Max 5 -- these work excellently together. If you're a student, Max is expensive-- if you're not, its very, very expensive. The cheapest solution is probably to use Poser 4 (proPack) and Lightwave. LW is much less expensive than 3DS, plays nice with Poser geometries, and has a very fast, high quality renderer Poser 5 is less compatible, so if you're looking for the hair and cloth room stuff, you'll have more difficulty. If you're on a tight budget, I'd spend the dollars on the fastest Windows box you can buy with a lot of memory. . .and then render in Poser. Although LW is faster and better than the Poser render engine, you're still going to be going from a 900 Mhz machine to a 3 gigahertz machine (I bought mine from PC connection for under $1K)-- this is a big increase in speed. So that's your highest priority. Also, look very carefully at your render settings. Reducing the number of polygons in your scene is very important. Also, reduce the number of shadow casting lights.Poser artists tend to drop in a lot of props and models which have a huge number of polys. . .resulting in very long render times. Don't rayrtrace. Don't use giant textures. If a figure is in the distance and has a 1 meg texture, reduce resolution in Photoshop. . .loading and processing these giant textures slows everything down. My best guess without knowing more about your project is that with a new machine and optomizing your settings, you can probably get a 5X increase in render speed in Poser over what you're doing getting now.