"However, until I see any evidence that the "professional" third-party figure creators have even an inkling of how to rig in Poser to its full potential, then there's really no point in wishing for yet more advanced features that nobody will be able to use properly." Now THIS is a great point. Anton's ApolloMax has proved that even with the "outdated" setup room and joint control currently in Poser, it is still entirely possible to get very adequate, and sometimes excellent bending from a figure. Until this is fully realized, I agree that introducing more advanced features is probably pointless for most people. "And the recent Miki movie shows that a Poser figure can achieve amazing effects in animation (yeah, I know, it was rendered in 3D Studio Max, but it was a Poser figure.)" I'm a big fan of Poser for some things... facial animation is one of them! Poser's control dials are super-easy to access, and allow animators to very quickly set up some great facial movement/expressions. Plus, the pre-made morphs you get with most figures take the tedious time out of creating your own expressions from scratch. That's the real power of Poser... to be able to access and animate things quickly! As you know, however, they weren't able to show a good full body animation with Miki, probably because her initial release had some horrible joint bending problems in the knee and elbow areas. Another trouble spot on most Poser figures is shoulder rotation, and how the mesh is deformed in that area. "I've been using 3dsmax for nearly 3 years now...I'm still saying 'Golly look at all these friggin' controls!'" I hear ya, Stefan! I''ve been using Max myself for about 2 years, and still feel like a darn newbie. ;-P

---

Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.