phari, it will take approx 6 months to learn how to use carrara well enuff to open and render
yer scenes in carrara.  the main advantage to users of poser 7 and earlier is that carrara
can open said scenes (pz3 files), and its shader tree and runtime structure are similar
to poser 7.  I don't know how much tweaking would be involved, but mark bremmer and
the other experts in the carrara forum will be able to assist, if problems arise.

no news yet on what rendering engine will be used in poser 8.  if FFRender is an evolutionary
dead-end (like Mac OS 9 and Windows XP), then they may well jettison it, provided they
get sufficient cash inflow to finance said rewrite.