Although I suspect you’ve heard it all before, the alternatives to Poser are Daz Studio, Carrara, Cinema 4D (with the Poser plugin) and Vue.

 

Daz Studio is not as confusing as people let on here. It is far easier to set up large scenes with its interface, the library is fast and doesn’t require any weird loop to IE and you get a 64 bit version for free if you buy the pro version. The drawbacks are that there is no IK, no dynamic cloth except some pre-made costumes sold separately, no hair module either.

 

Carrara doesn’t load a Poser scene reliably, but it can handle Poser content. I don’t like the interface, but that’s just me. (Maybe I’m weird for wishing that you could set a morph by dragging on a dial instead of typing in a value.) It has IK, hair, superior animation tools, but no cloth. The renderer should be capable of doing better than most of the renders I see posted. I’m not sure what the problem is with Carrara renders.

 

Cinema 4D is reputed to be solid. It’s pretty expensive. You’d have to buy the Poser plugin separately. (I think it’s called Interposer.) Last I heard, you couldn’t use IK with Poser content in Cinema 4D, but maybe it has been added to Interposer by now. Obviously, Cinema 4D has a professional renderer, and there is a cloth and a hair module. (Those might cost extra and I’m not sure how well they would integrate with the Poser content.)

 

Vue just lets you import Poser scenes. You won’t be able to manipulate the figures much within Vue. (Despite the hype, the ability to manipulate Poser figures in Vue is poorly implemented and ridiculously dysfunctional.) If you computer is choking on Poser 8 Runtimes, it probably wouldn’t handle Vue well at all. I find the Poser 8 libraries to be pretty quick most of the time, despite a ton of content, but my computer is fairly capable. 

Download my free stuff here: http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.php?page=2&userid=323368