nikita_s_cold; I'm with ynsaen on this; Poser is actually an excellent animation tool (always add the caveat 'in its price range' to any positive statement about Poser. :P ). And if you -are- interested in animation, definitely get P5. You will have a lot of uses for the dynamic cloth abilities. And once you get comfortable with Poser, you need to check out Vue d'Esprit. This is a terrain generator program, like unto Bryce is (save that Vue is still in active development, whereas Bryce is dying due to lack of interest from its current owner). Vue, though, works very well with Poser; it can import a PZ3 file natively (this is the extension on a Poser saved file; the other one you will see is .pzz, which is a compressed version of same. P5 gives you the option of using either). And to get an idea of just what Poser and Vue can do together, sneak on over to www.belino.net, the home of Phoul. Be sure to have Quicktime 6 installed, and have a lobster bib and pan to catch your eyes when they fall out. There are demo versions of Vue available for download, to check things out with. Vue also has an add-on called Mover 4, which is what allows you to import Poser animations into Vue animations; and Mover 5 is in beta right now, which supports the dynamic cloth and hair in P5 (just about the only other program to do so, at the moment). One thing about the 'long involved shots' that ynsaen mentioned. You -can- get away with them in CG, as your actors never have to go potty, but if you study scene breaks in movies, TV, anime, etc, you'll see that most scenes are quite short, with lots of cuts. Those long, sweeping panorama type shots that last a minute or more are extremely rare, as getting them right are a royal pain in the butt. But you can composite lots of little shots in a video editing program, and they are available from the cheap up to the current cadillac (Adobe Premiere). You will find there are several animators running around loose here who will be more than happy to torur--er, give any help they can. And as ernyoka1 said, hunt out Dr. Geep's tutorials. He not only explains the esoterica, he does in a way that both beginners and experienced folk can comprehend and enjoy. (Actually, you will find that the manual that comes with Poser doesn't really answer a lot of the questions you will find yourself asking; one of the big reasons this community popped up). Oh, and just to add to the torture, over at www.DAZ.com (which is the modelling company (Zygote) that provided the P4 figures, and became a spin-off business unto itself selling Poser content), there is a program called Mimic2. This takes a sound file, analyzes it to identify the phonemes of the speech, and controls the facial morphs to 'lip-sync' the chosen character's mouth with the speech track. So there is a way to have characters doing dialog as well.... >:)=