As an animator, Opera, I also agree with you.

HOWEVER, I think CL definitely want to progress Poser further as an animation tool, which makes me think we might actually see some form of native network rendering in P6. I should hope so, with all the other advanced rendering features they are promising. There's no doubt, with things like SSS and some of the lighting features they have indicated, that render times would be increased greatly, so network rendering at this point makes perfect sense.

Animation is where 3D truly makes it's usefulness as an artistic medium fully realized. 3D empowers animators to do things they couldn't do quite as efficiently before. Given the climate of the 3D genre in general, it would almost appear to be financial suicide if Curious Labs doesn't pay attention to the needs and wants of animators who have an interest in utilizing their product. Animators have been asking for network rendering capability natively in Poser for a while now. Especially since the Firefly renderer was introduced in P5. Although I find the RIB export format and other options like platform-specific 3rd-party plugins (Bodystudio, etc.), to be sufficient for integrating Poser into other high end network-capable software, most hobbyists or "weekend warrior" animators don't find that solution very useful to them. Even professionals would like to have the option to run certain projects through the resident application to save time.

Bottom line: I'm going to upgrade to P6 regardless (actually looking forward to it), but it might be the last upgrade I ever do on a Curious Labs product if there's no native network rendering capability in this version.

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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.