Hi Folks! Tas, I've been a professional graphic artist and multimedia producer for nearly 25 years. My weak suit has always been illustrating humans. As an animator I was great with cartoon figures, but making people that really looked liked people--well, not so good. Thank goodness for clip art from companies like Dynamic Graphics! My point is that with Poser I have a tool that enhances the value of both my illustration and animation projects. And while I do intend to purchase Lightwave later this year, Poser presents an ever-growing library of resources and a low learning curve for an affordable price. For perspective you should check out a copy of Poser 1 when it was introduced by Fractal Design. It was originally designed as a "posing aid" for artists. As it improved it caught the eyes of hobbyists. And it has continued to improve to the point that a lot of professionals now consider it an important component in their digital toolbox. PPP will probably evolve into a product that may provide results that are comparable to Lightwave on avatar modeling. But Poser was never intended to compete with high-end applications. And at a cost of roughly $200 and already demanding 128MB of RAM to run effectively, why should it? Peter (Dr Zik)