"I just had to respond to say Thanks lmckenzie (picture me standing in the corner and blushing), ..."

Hey DustRider, you're very welcome. Your work, e.g. The Plan did give me a better iimpression of Carrara, though to be honest, the idea and the composition are a big part of why I like that image as well. Elianeck's work is superb! Thanks for the links.

Every renderer's lighting, etc. has a different 'out of the box' look. What little I had seen from Carrara and my very cursory dabbling (C6P) was vaguely lacking in some hard to describe way, maybe contrast or color intensity or Jjroland's comment about depth or realism. Part of it may be simply what kind of look one prefers. Certainly, works like Elianeck's Twins really have a look I like. There may be other applications that are closer to that by default but I imagine that the good ones are all pretty capable of achieving it with more or less effort.

Quite a few folks here seem to be into hardcore photo-realism these days and Poser has certainly become much more capable in that regard. Thanks to people like Snarly and BB, there are some great ways to harness that. If you get into creating your own materials though, I'm not sure that the learning curve is any less steep than for the 'higher-end' programs. With lighting, you're always going to have to learn the 'personality' of whatever you're using. One great advantage of Poser is that it's always been content driven. Because of that, tons of stuff is ready made. There's certainly shaders etc. for C4D, Carrara etc. but Poser really has that covered. There's a lot to be said for staying within the DAZ (DS-Carrara)/Poser universe.

Unfortunately, the advancements have made it harder for many to venture outside. I used to lust for realism. I still admire it, but these days (3rd childhood) I'm as likely to prefer cute toons or a more 'artistic' look - even if it's only achieved through image editor filters :-) I could still fire up Poser 4 to set up a scene and take it into Vue or some other program, do some basic material stuff and then work on lighting, atmosphere, etc. That's not going to cut it for the beautiful shader laden, skin you can touch, 'is that a photo?' scene (dynamics are probably another issue). Even IF you can find equivalents for the other program, you're still going to have to manually substitute.

I'd encourage anyone to look at alternatives. There's nothing wrong with using only Poser but there's something to be said for being promiscuous too. With regard to evaluating older versions, geekatplay.com has a lot of free video tutorials for Vue that go back to at least Vue 6. I know tutorials aren't a substitute for hands on experience but they can give you some idea of the interface, the workflow etc. They're probably similar resources for C4D. Also if you're seriously looking at spending big bucks then I'd consider getting one or two books on the software - you might find some at the library. In my day, we didn't have these demo CDs (or any CDs for that matter) and these fancy intertube videos, we read.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken