Poser is a good solution for posing and positioning figures, and for rendering, but it suffers from a problem with needing huge amounts of memory. Not mentioned is Bryce: go to www.daz3d.com immediately: you can, for a few days, get Bryce 5 for free.There's other offers. There's also the free Studio program from DAZ, which does a good deal of what Poser can do. Even though Studio needs paid-for plug-ins to do some things which come as standard with Poser, it's still a pretty inexpensive route.