Well, at least DAZ is considering moving character content into the future rather than letting its corpse rot on the sidewalk and languish in the basking sunlight of computer and 3D advancement (and they've always backed up their intent). Other than micropolygon displacement, what has Poser 5 really offered that is so much better than Poser 4, Poser 3? And how has Poser competed with the rest of the 3D CG industry? Oh, that's right, they haven't. Since Poser 4 ProPack, Lightwave has gone up two versions, Maya three, 3DSMax three, Cinema two, Vue one and Pro, all adding more and more power to a stable base (for the most part). And still no real plugins for the other apps yet. Unless the new Japanese owner of Poser has an amazing idea up their sleeve to make Poser modern, Poser just ain't gonna do it for real character work anymore. I have a 2x2.66GHz, 4GB RAM, 533MHz bus system with more than 1/2 TeraByte (yes, your read that correctly) of storage and Poser stills chugs along at a snail's pace (esp. Poser 5), still has its flakiness, and still couldn't do a rudimentary animation with several figures without several weeks to spare. Have you seen LOTR, Star Wars, et al lately? That's the future of character animation... If my business depended on Poser, I wouldn't be in business. When it did depend on Poser content (Daz's Eagle and Eagle motions), I used C4D to do the animation work in reasonable time periods and professional rendering levels (you know, real lights, HDRI, realtime previews, and no quirky animation cycles). Sorry, I'll place my bets on DAZ. Ante up to the future. Kuroyume

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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