For those of us that do a lot of comercial and non comercial 3d, poser is so close to being the all around tool,as for driving up the price for editing , truespace is very affordable and ray tracing is a must for high end work, when you do closeups and serious scene work , shadow maps just dont do it.Poser can be the best program out there, affordable( even at say,500.00) when you consider that studiomax is up in the 10,000 dollar range. you do need to be able to edit and animate on the fly, this is a must in complicated scenes....poser has made its place as a serious 3d charactor tool, I like it better than studiomax charactor studio,... knight