"...these are prop apps that are just being used to create poser content This suggests to me that you have a very "poser centric" viewpoint. You want to know why I got involved in Poser? Because it had content I could import into other applications for use there. Poser for me is simply a niche posing application with some animation capability. It's renderer is quite good (if slow) and it has a rigging system that makes it relatively easy to add clothing to base figures once they are modelled." heh, you dont think that i meant that rhino, max, etc only exist to create poser content do you? i should rephrase - it was supposed to mean that with regards to this discussion, they do not 'compete' with poser but are products that many poser users use in order to create content for poser. right now there really isnt anything out there that directly competes with poser feature-for-feature, and im just wondering why that is, why noones stepped in to offer some competition. poser grew from a small community but surely by now the communities are big enough to justify at least some interest from developers. and while there are some people who are here in the poser forum because they use poser content to import into something like max or lightwave - which is their main workspace - i dont think this is the case for the majority of them. as for cinematic quality 3d i obviously dont mean someone is going to produce a full length feature film in poser, i mean that people can get stills similar to those they see in CG ads, games, movies, the media, etc right from home as a hobbyist, with no professional training. sure you can sit here and say 'its not really on par with high-end 3d film' but thats nitpicking - you get the idea. in terms of rigging - no offense to either anton or jim - but i really havent seen anything yet that really impresses me and makes me say 'wow, that truly revolutionizes poser'... but i think thats going to have to come from CL's end anyway. seems apollo maximus looks good in some poses but that introduces weaknesses in others in which the unimesh figures perform well (as well as texture stretching, etc). as for jim's creation, its a further extension of the JCMs that weve been been forced to use for years to compensate for a shitty rigging system in poser which - while it can be tweaked and retweaked and compensated for through all sortsof poser tricks weve discovered - is still light years away from proper rigging and will never be the same until CL addresses it and reworks the program to support less primitive, more advanced rigging systems seen in professional 3d apps these days. personally im getting about as tired of all these 'workarounds' that us merchants have to do to poser products just to get them to not look like crap - such as JCMs on all of the joints and a host of other types of cr2 hacking - and to compensate for failings in the program's rigging system. i shudder to think how much work anton and jim had to go through to combat all these issues, and while their products do look great they still dont work as well as a properly rigged figure should (and no fault of their own - theyve squeezed pretty much all the juice out of poser's joint system that they could). the fact that its nearly 2006 and the core elements of poser still remain pretty primitive while tonnes of overhyped, glorified technical mumbo-jumbo 'bullet points' get added to the box to increase sales is kindof pathetic if you really think about it. im sure if there were 1-2 other companies competing with CL for our hobbyist dollars these issues would be addressed damned quickly and wed be left with a more streamlined package that progresses each year with newer technology as opposed to just getting tired 3rd party content hacked into it for the sake of adding bullet points to a product box. cheers, and goodnight folks, -gabriel