Well If you intend to render in Max on a regular basis, i would say that it is definately worth the upgrade. I doubt that Poser Five will come out untill 2002, although i could be right off the beam, but I remember Steve Cooper saying in his spotlight here, that it was still a way off. I have never used the PPP plugin to import large scenes into Max. I don't really do stuff like that anymore anyway. I had a little trouble with it in the beginning but I think that was my own fault. Unlike exporting .obj's from Poser and importing them into max, PPP imports the whole scene, as if it where still inside Poser. Everything is textured and apart from setting up lights and cameras it is pretty much ready to go. You don't have to smooth the figures either. Although, because my scenes usually only consist of one figure, I tend to sub divide my figure just prior to rendering in order to remove the polygon shapes from parts of the figure such as the outline of the head. Unless you have a 'MONSTER' machine, I wouldn't say that this would be very advisable with more than one figure as it will bring a standard machine to a crawl. The tutorial that I wrote, is basically a 'How to' get deeper into the Poser scene in Max. You could actually set the same thing up with an imported .obj, but it would take a lot more time. The problems that I have with the lashes are really not a problem as they are set up correctly on import. The lashes are there and rendering complete with transparency. It's just that they are not very visible. I noticed the same on the Final Fantasy portraits, so maybe it is a quirk of higher end renderers. I really only use the PPP for specificic work. Like stuff done in the setup room, as I find it a fair bit slower than Poser 4.03. You don't actually have to use PPP to import into max. You just need to install the Max plugin. Maybe CL should have given an option to purchase the plugin seperately. Hope this rambling stuff helps you somewhat. Colm...