I'd like to say something about using C4D as a render engine for Studio, but thanks to DAZ borking Carrara 8.5 so badly, I'm doing about the same thing with carrara now. I stage my figures in Studio to send to carrara to finish staging and render the scene. I bought animate 2 so I could work out animations in Studio to run/render in carrara.

I may run down DAZ but I think Studio is a pretty nice app especially now that it has tools. Even if DAZ hadn't borked C8.5 I'd still be using Studio for animating and for optitex clothes. Not saying carrara doesn't do great animation, but carrara doesn't have aniblocks.