Well, since noone here really even mentioned Animation:Master, I'll stick my two cents in: Animation:Master Costs $299. Poser costs $249. Animation:Master costs $99 to upgrade, whether you upgrade next year, or ten years from now. It's true, you will have to learn to model, and not rely on other people's work to create your own animations if you decide to use animation: Master.If you were hoping to just buy a whole bunch of models online and slap them together into an animation, then, maybe A:M isn't for you. But if you're the type of creative person who's not afraid of making everything yourself anyway, then you'd love it. A:M doesn't use polygons, so it won't import anything mode than a static prop from a polygon program. A:M uses splines. If you can draw or sculpt, you can use splines. You need much less splines to create a model in A:M than you would need polygons to create the same model in a poly program. This saves a lot of time when making morph targets. A:M has CP weighting, smart skinning, muscle mode, dynamics, particles, spriticles, volumetrics, and a host of other features that Poser doesn't. Have you ever tried to get a character to pick up an object, carry it somewhere, and then put it down, all in the same shot in Poser? You can't do it. You can't switch parents mid animation in poser. How about animating a character swinging a sword with both hands, or a baseball bat? Try parenting a poser figure's feet to a ball, so you can make them balance on it. How about making a bicep bulge when the elbow bends, or a skirt that extends below the knees? (sure, you can do it in poser, but WITHOUT having to hack into a cr2? nope) All very easy to do with A:M. Setting up and animating a character in A:M is ten times easier than it would be in poser, thanks to A:M's powerful constraint systems. It's tools like these that made me stop using Poser over 5 months ago, and not look back even once. In fact, A:M's animation features are more comparable to those of MAYA's Motion Builder than those of Poser, in terms of power and ease of use. Will A:M get you anywhere? well, one user is now working at Pixar, and animated several shots in "The Incredibles". His name is even mentioned several times in the dommentary. (Victor Navone). Another worked on BlueSky's "Robots" (Raf Anzovin). Both STILL use A:M for their own projects, and are active members of the A:M community. A:M is also attracting a lot of professional Stop-Motion animators lately. Animators who've worked on such titles as "Corpse Bride" "Nightmare Before Christmas" "James and the Giant Peach", and even "Bob the Builder". If you'd like to see some examples of what's been done with A:M, I'd suggest looking here: http://amfilms.hash.com/ And Here: http://www.hash.com/stills/