That character on the book is not actually "super high res". Its actually a low density cage mesh thats just been metaNurbed. I myself work in LW to create my figures, however it has been a chore to bring them into Poser because LW export didn't support transfer of Parts to Groups, and no UV data is exported. But thats probably a non-issue as of the Poser Pro Pack's new figure setup ease, and the fact that I've become so found of UVmapper that I use it over even 6.5s built in mapping tools. Sigh.. Curious Labs are gonna put us figure creators out of business. heh ;) The main reason I would think everyone should have LW is the modelling ease, and the renderer. There is no beating the radiosity, caustics, and IBL lighting for realism. The procedurals materials are great, and can even make sloping materials to mimic bryce terrains i.e certain textures based on poly slopes. There are a billion free plugins floating around; velvet shaders, fresnel, ect. There are the very fast built in volumetrics that can simulate solids or gaseous volumes. Make a plane chop it up a bit, shape it to a rolling landscape, select some of the points, and you can turn lay volumetric thick snow on top of it. Rambles off... And the subdivison surfaces (metaNurbs) in LW are the best out there imo. Extremely controllable. I could go on... Simple IBL samples of Z's Michael... http://clients.unimatrix.com/mlane/iblhuman.jpg http://clients.unimatrix.com/mlane/iblhuman2.jpg Same exact scene. No lights in the scene. All I did was change the background image thats being used to light it. Can create a completely different time of day, mood, ect. All by changing the background image. ML