According to a sales rep at one of Alias/Wavefront's Resellers, Maya 4, which will be released in about 60 days, should cost about $7500US. It runs under Unix or WinNT/2000. You'd need workstation level cpu/memory/graphics to get your money's worth, and a separate render engine running on a graphics server class machine to really get this kind of results. Then again, look at some of the work that's been done with Poser, using post in PhotoShop/PSP. I agree that it's the modelers. Give somone with talent a pencil and a piece of notebook paper, they can create art. Give them better tools, they can go even farther. GrayMare..who wants an SGI workstation and Maya for Christmas so he can make higher-tech messes of his renders...