We just had the Lightwave VS. Max discussion in this Poser forum, about three pages back from this post, if you want to look it up. Seems like most people responding here are pro-Lightwave, though personally, I like Max. The Poser Pro Pack is SUPPOSED to allow you to import Poser animations into Ligthwave and Max. HOWEVER... Curious Labs STILL hasn't fixed their Pro Pack to work with Max4 yet, though (MUCH to my disappointment). So if that's a concern for you, be aware of that. However, the Character Studio module for Max is so good, I'm finding that the only reason I need poser is to interact with others modelers here and collect/convert, since Max's Character Studio does incredible skeletal and animation work that the PPP can't easily match. The Pro Packs' programmability is nice and offers potential, but is still much harder to bone and animate with and is much less flexible out-of-the-box than Character Studio is. (Obviously, it's much less expensive, too, so you'd expect that.) If you're serious about animating figures, moving up to Max/CS would help. --