"max is the most difficult to use 3d app I have seen." Seen or worked with? There's nothing really hard about the application other than the learning curve associated with having so many features (compared to Poser for instance). It's probably one of the easiest of the high end apps to learn if you just go through the tutorials and manual. There's also tons of online resources associated to learning it. How quickly you learn it depends on how you work... if you are accustomed to a particular interface of another app, then it can be tricky, but that goes for just about any program out there. "I wouldn`t say "most people using Poser have little interest in anything beyond the renderer" some will just want to render pictures but there are quite a few who have used and still use other 3d apps and make figures and props etc." Yeah, some people make stuff in other apps, but I'm willing to bet the vast majority do NOT. They simply render pretty pictures with it. Thus the reason I said "most". ;-) "Max has always been slow on my computer, not as slow as daz studio but slower than poser 5. ;)" I can't explain this. Maybe it's your graphics card, I don't know. But in just about every benchmark I've ever tried on my machine, the Max default render engine was FAR faster than P5's Firefly engine. Particularly when it came down to rendering raytraced reflections and shadowmaps from multiple light sources. P5 takes a much longer time to prepare the scene geometry and calculate shadow maps than almost any other program I've ever used. Then there's MentalRay... I really can't compare it to P5's features, because there is no comparison in either speed or quality. MentalRay is a proven production renderer that can handle just about any job you throw at it with ease. However, I give Firefly the top nod when it comes to displacement rendering... it's definitely faster and more efficient at that than any renderer used by 3dsMax.

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

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