"What software would be used to create and animate film characters like this? Poser? Maya? Maya, XSI, Lightwave, and 3dsmax have all been used in film FX. Maya is usually the application most associated with movie animation these days, followed by XSI. Lightwave and 3dsmax get used a lot more for production work on TV and video games. Most of the big time FX studios use their own proprietary solutions in combination with some very customized versions of these applications. Poser isn't used often, if at all, for major VFX work. Perhaps in the future it will see some action for certain types of shots, but it's not really at the point where it fits comfortably in a production pipeline... yet.

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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.