Also look at Vue 5. You can bring Poser stuff directly into it. The biggest thing with all these programs is two-part. Your real expense is time + money + learning curve (how much hair will you lose in frustration). I was using DKB (now known as POV) because it was free and my employer wouldn't spend the $3000 to get a 3d program with visual aids such as GUI... so I built my spaceships in code and rendered repeatedly. My time saved would have paid for that program! I was the only artist on the floor with a drafting background, so at least I could use it. Spend enough to get something workable, but not so much of a hog that you need to spend another couple thousand on a year-long class. The other part of the equation concerns what you want to render... what specific effects are you after? If you are doing large outdoor scenes flooded with sunlight, Maya has about the worst and weakest lighting of the bunch... and you'll want Lightwave or something with decent radiosity. If you are generating characters for animation, you'll want something with easy rigging and lots of morph capabilities. If you are rendering still-lifes or interiors, you'll want a true ray-tracer so that your crystal doesn't look like plastic. Large trade shows (such as MacWorld next week) usually have booths staffed with techy guys as well as sales people, so you can ask the engineers some hard questions and get a feeling for the support levels behind the products. You can also get free demo disks for most of these products so that you can test the interface. Carolly