For landscapes with vegetation: nothing beats Vue 5 Infinite IMO. Very good and relatively fast renders, distributed rendering for both stills and animations (render nodes for a 5 machine farm are included with the license, additional node licenses can be purchased separately). Importing Poser figures and animations works very well, including dynamic cloth and hair. Modeling capacities of Vue are very limited. Easy to use interface (I got the hang of the basics within 20 minutes and without the manual). Bryce is cheap, has a good but very slow render engine, good for landscapes, very limited modeling capacity, Poser imports are a huge pain, DAZ|Studio imports work much smoother. Bryce cannot import animations. The Bryce user interface is not compatible with my way of thinking. After two days of confusion I couldn't do in Bryce what I could do in Vue after 20 minutes. If you want to do only terrains, take a look at Terragen. Poser 6 is THE tool when it comes to human figures, both for stills and animations. It is the cheapest program by far that has physics-based cloth and hair (admitted, Maya Cloth beats Poser Cloth any time of the day or night, but $10,000 is a LOT more money than $250!) The Poser 6 render engine has image-based lighting, ambient occlusion, displacement mapping, procedural textures, volumetric lighting, raytraced reflections and refractions. It is not a really fast render engine, especially not when raytracing is used, and the scenes can not be overly complicated before it stalls. Poser has no modeling capabilities. While it is possible to create better figures in Max/Maya, that is an awesome lot of work and needs a lot of experience in either program. Boning and animating the mesh is also difficult and time-consuming. For modeling I use 3D Studio Max 4 and it suits my needs. I don't use the lighting, shader, animation and render options of Max. The problem with 3DS Max and especially Maya is the price tag. 3DS Max 4 comes with a lousy default renderer, if you want better renders you'll have to purchase additional render engines, which are pretty expensive. So I just stick with the modeling features and do the rendering in another app (usually Vue). I've got a license from work, so I didn't have to buy Max myself. I never would have bought Max for its modeling capabilities alone. Shade and C4D seem to have similar modeling capabilities and are much more affordable. Creating textures: Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Photoshop may be the standard, PSP is almost as versatile and a lot cheaper. And there's also The Gimp. Good luck!

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