" Lightwave 8.5 (soon to be 9.0) and the Worley Labs plugins (G2 for skin shading, Fprime for speckle free ray-traced soft shadows, Sasquatch for dynamic hair) are a great combination for doing people renders. Lightwave 8.5 by itself doesn't do SSS (not sure whether LW9 will or not), so I highly recommend G2 to go with it. Greenbriarstudios has Poser import plugins for Maya, C4D, and Lightwave, although I haven't tried them yet. Also, LW64 will let you load up multiple characters in complex scenes (Neither Maya nor 3DS MAx 8 support 64bit computing yet!) Whatever way you go, make sure it's 64bit!<<<<" here's the bottomline: you sound like me you Demand DIRECT support of the poser pz3 format as in. make my scene in poser& save open my other program file import/open and get the poser scene with textures props hair all intact. your only real option for this is VUE or carrara pro and possibly "mojoworld' DO NOT buy lightwave maya or max just to import poser scenes via some tenuous third party plugin!! Why?? within 18 months a new version or point release of these other programs will be out and you will get the update either free or for little money and suddenly "greenbriar' "riess" studio" et als plugins will be broken. and you will have to stick with your OLD version of LW,cinema4D, your OLD version of MAX /MAYA and hope and pray the thes third party providers will "eventually" update the poser import plugin so you can import poser files DIRECTLY AGAIN!! I went through years of frustration after Curious labs released a poser import plugin with the propack for Cinem4DXL 7.3 and then abandoned any further releases as Maxon released newer version of Cinema4D that DID NOT work with my poser import plugin so i was stuck booting over into MAC OS9(UUGGHH!!) just to run my OLD version Of C4D to render poser scenes. Carrara pro offers DIRECTposer(PZ3) import as a standard PROGRAM FEATURE. so does vue in two years when the next cool version of Carrara or Vue arrive sthe question of DIRECT poser support will be Moot ...it will be there. who in creation knows where greenball and rice patty will be doing to support what ever version of LW/MAX/MAY etcis out in two years Cut out the middleman

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