Hi MikeJ

How's it going?  Great,  I hope.  We just got hit with a foot of snow!  Anyway,  don't take my posts as defending any app or critizing any app.  See,  unless we have a studio like ILM or Pixar that have their own CG programmers and CG programs we will never have a "end all be all app."  That being said,  we use several apps in a pipeline,  and the apps we use from Maya to Poser all have their strengths and weaknesses.  I'm sure you are well aware of this.

As for Poser,  personally,  I think the Poser Pro version should have support for Sub-D (both Subpatch and Catmull-Clark),  one point polys (BTW check out Proton's outlines video ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/ ),  and double sided polys.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Displacement needs to be fixed,  along with raytracing.  Not to mention an overhaul of the rigging.  I don't think they will be able to accomplish this by attaching scripts to their existing code.  Now,  given Poser as is,  I find it to be a great previz app for Lightwave.

As for Carrara,  I don't know much about it,  but I do know this,  tax return time i'm going to add it to my pipeline. The reason,  I have a lot of low poly, high res normal map models that I'd like to share with the community and I feel Carrara will be the app to do it.  Side note:  I've heard people were having problems with Poser figures eyes when they import them into Carrara.  Here's the Lightwave fix  http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/tutorials/animation/eyes/index.html  I'm sure the same principles could be applied in Carrara.

BTW I have a lot of Lightwave rigs for Poser figures,  if you want I could upload them to the freebies after I'm done with the V4 morphs.

Cheers

Pat