That the concept works is well proven by the many open source projects that are available. POVRay and the Gimp are very fine examples. I'm not a programmer, don't have too much real concept of what's involved, but it seems to me that any program that will do image manipulation such as Poser or D|S is going to be a long term project. Maybe I should have said "object manipulation", but it seems to me like that's going to end up as a very lot of code. POVRay has a lot of front ends, none that I like any better than the text screen scripting. Maybe something that can carry on a "two way conversation" with POV might be a place to start, but that would probably require that most of POV's rendering engine be incorporated in the program. Stuck in the collection of instabilities that is known as windoze would be a mistake. THings that crash in windoze have no problems in my Linux box. Micro$oft'$ stubborn refusal to include any compilers in windoze is another factor. Limits the number of people that are going to stick out the money for their overpriced collections of patches and crashes.