Whoops, lastly, I should point out that I have rigged the Vicki base mesh in 3ds using Character Studio, and I found it much much easier to pose her because I didn't have to struggle with system crashes, bad joints, and ugly folds in the mesh. Her bends were much more natural and the IK was smoother and more intuitive. If only 3dsMax Demo had a working version of Character Studio, I'd encourage people to download it and try it for themselves, but sadly it does not. What I'm looking for in future versions of Poser would be more powerful animation capabilities, and a much more intuitive interface. However, then you're looking at the price of the software going up higher than some would be willing to pay, because of the extra programming involved. It's a very "bloated" program right now (in that it's easy to bring to it's knees), and has a very strange and inconvenient workflow. I don't think anyone who's experienced more advanced software can argue that point. Unless you've tried the high end software (and I mean really tried it), there's no way to understand why it costs so much compared to Poser. But there's many reasons, and once you get involved in animation, they become clear. Anyway, I like Poser very much, it's well worth what it costs to be frank. You can absolutely produce impressive work with it, but the price to pay might be the hair on your head if you decide to use it for long, complex animating.. ;-)

---

Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.