"What would it take to make Poser a "Professional" application?" It can be a professional application as it is right now (aside from the memory issue in P6, which will be resolved soon I hope), but it all depends on what profession you're talking about. For just about anything to do with stills, Poser can already be used professionally (there's lots of people using it for commercial works dealing with still images). For animation/video, it's not quite there yet. It's fine for general animation use, but when you get into things like complex feature-film animations, FX, and high-end CG compositing, it falls VERY short. In fact, it barely takes off at all. Even P6, with it's new "shadowcatcher" and great lighting/shading features doesn't help this. Some features that would help Poser find it's way to more professional use, without the need to export to other apps/renderers might be: * Extensive G-Buffer/multi-pass output, for higher levels of control over video post-processing and compositing. The shadow-only renderer is a step in the right direction, but far from ideal. * Multiple and configurable levels of undo (already mentioned time after time), because no professional is going to trust their paid works to an app that is so unforgiving to error. * Deeper rigging and animation controls, because animators can't really spend the rest of eternity fixing bad joints/bends in animation after the fact. * Resolve shadow map flicker without the need to rescale the scene. This is a devistating problem even in P6 where shadow maps (regardless of resolution) tend to produce flicker in certain close-up animations. Raytrace shadows solve this, but at the expense of much longer render times. Which brings me to... * Native network rendering capability.

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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.