I'd reccomend Vue if you want to do a lot of outdoor scenes. I've also used Poser with an older version of Truespace (TS 4.3) with the Truepose and LUUV plugins. That worked quite well. I find I am rendering in Poser 5 itself more and more. It doesn't have practical volumetrics, or any advanced rendering stuff like Radiosity, but for straight up raytracing it works great. (Provided you have a robust machine.)And P5 does have some fairly advanced features that are lacking in some other lower end 3d apps, like Poly smoothing and displacement mapping. If I had the bucks and the inclination to learn a new interface from scratch I'd probably choose lightwave.