Well im someone who started with Poser, went on to Lightwave, and currently work in Maya, but im not a master or anything like that so take my post as a 2c take on this... I agree with all that is posted above and IMO your choice of poser or something like MAX/Maya/XSI/etc really depends on what you intend to do with your chars. ie are they destined to be standins in an archi viz, or are they leads in an animation, or extras in an ad or what ? Also just what level of realism are you looking for ? And what is then final destination of your chars, will they be rendered in poser itself or do you intend to export them into MAX ? Poser is generally a great app for creating lots of customised chars in a fast and easy manner. Just twist the dials around and you can quickly build up the kind of char you need. Posing is a snap, as is simple animation. The latest render engine has lots of featuers, rivalling high end apps in this and you can do a lot with its node based materials (which even MAX doesnt have IIRC) You can buy lots of inexpensive content for it (like clothes, props, armors etc) so you dont always have to waste time creating something boring or tedious. I often buy poser content just because of this, even though i may not ever use it in Poser itself. However, even with all this, Poser is not : 1. An animation app, it has nothing like contraints or controllers, and any kind of complex animation is painful to do in it. 2. A dynamics app, it has no real particles, and its hair/softbody/cloth systems are weak at best. Maya and MAX are a lot lot better at it in this area. 3. A content creation app, it has primitive modelling tools, and anything original you need, you are gonna have to create in a 3rd party app, and convert it for use in Poser. Which for organic type characters is a very convoluted/painful process. 4. A fast renderer, even with all the nice features, firefly and the native renderer are several magnitudes slower then mentalray, VRay or renderman etc. The nature of posers skinning and content also leads to situations where post work is a necessity for decent results. Which may or may not be feasible for your project (eg you cant paint away elbow joint errors on 200 frames of an animation) 5. An app for complex scenes, or at least not for single layer complex scenes. To do a scene with lots of characters and such you are gonna have to render your stuff in layers and comp them later on. Which may or may not be an option for you. Cause unlike both XSI and Maya, Poser doesnt have a native layer manager. In Maya for example you can setup multilayer scenes with overrides and passes per layer (like shadow, diffuse, reflection etc), use different objects/lights/cams/materials in each layer and so on. And have all the layers render and composite into one image on the fly with the click of one button. XSI also lets you do something quite similar. In short even now when i'm pretty proficient in Maya i use poser plenty of times, but only where its appropriate. Like i recently had to do some work for a diet tonic ad. And rather then waste time creating and morphing a human from scratch, i just used V3's morphs to setup a before/after type animation in Maya. Rendering was done in Maya so i could use its advanced SSS shaders and its fluid system. Which gave me fast and flexible results, as in the best of both worlds. I could have done the whole thing in Maya, or maybe even in Poser, but both these options would prolly have taken longer and been harder then the hybrid approach.