I'll stick with Poser 4. The last thing I need is a learning curve of this magnitude. The gap in the market was for a low cost rendering tool which would faithfully import a .pz3 (morphs, transparency, invisibility...everything Poser does) and do a better ray-tracing rendering job on it. I've heard good reports of Vue d'Esprit in this regard, but you have to pay for a lot of other features.

what is daz studeo for? is it for makin characters?

Everyone must remember that Daz|Studio is only in Alpha-stage production at this point. This isn't even a BETA yet - it's not nearly ready for prime-time. The release is basically for evaluation purposes only in order to gain user feedback on features and bugs so that the Beta release will be a nearly finished product. Also, I donot believe that there are ANY plugins available for it at this stage either - the first will probably be released with the Beta or later.

Daz studio seems to be like the poser 5 firefly renderer with everything else left out. It is very slow, even compared to poser 5! It does look promising, though. Digiscott it is not for making figures, at least, not yet.

Digiscott if you join daz ( for free ) then for the next month you will automatically be a platinum club member and you will be able to download daz studio and try it out for yourself.

Alpha and Beta stages of software are pre-release levels that are used to firm up design (alpha) and work out bugs (beta). It might be premature to make decisions on the product in this stage of the game. I haven't been able to use it much as it runs very slowly on my machine ... so I may wait for a beta release before I make a judgement. 8-)

I was hoping someone was going to give us poor techno-dummies somewhere to go after Poser 4 Poser 5: Take it away mommy I'm scared DAZ studio: OK it might be great eventually but I want it now - and I could have it if they'd set their sights a little lower