hey guys, thanks for the advice and tips!

I've been playing with Lightwave, houdini and C4D lately (demos obviously) and C4D came out the most attractive for me. Easy UI, fast renderer, poser stuff loads fairly easily (and also the option of interposer), and just feels nice to play with. Lightwave confused the hell out of me and didn't get any further then loading a mesh and exporting it. Houdini is actually pretty awesome for rigs I've seen, and I also like their node-based approach. The sky is the limit with that app. I played with it for a bit, but I think it might be a little over the top for what I do.

However since you guys keep on saying Max and Maya, I checked out a tut on Max rigging and I feel so stupid now. Its actually bloody easy! I've done this before using their character studio plugin, but that was ten years ago and I remembered that it was clunky to use, which it clearly isn't anymore. So I think Max has suddenly become a serious contender. I have it for modeling anyway so might as well make use of it for rigs too... I'm just dreading the materials interface. Maya confuses me. I've never understood that app properly.

@willdial: if Nerd can unfudge P11 so that PE can work in her, she'll most likely become a reality for you, unless I come across another massive bug, which is very possible. But even then I think I'll just ignore it and release her. For plug-and-play artists Poser is still perfectly fine, and PE might revive interest in Poser. Once you start demanding more from it, it just depends on how patient / tolerant you are, or how much content you have in your runtimes. It seems like you're not the average plug-n-play artist so don't be too scared of looking further if it will help you with your art. I'll probably be using Poser for a while still since I can make comics with PP2014 for another year or two easily, but at some point I will want to start making more complex figures, and aspire to better renders, and that's just not happening in Poser. Poser goes for $500, but for the extra freedom, reliability and options, C4D and Lightwave are not that much more expensive. Lightwave was on sale recently for something like $750 I think. C4D has many options for Poser content and it actually loads pretty easily. The figures might be a bit of an issue though.

There's also another contender and that is Modo. I tried it recently and immediately spotted some workflow issues. But I need to give it another try using tutorials because I've seen that its quite a good app with what it can do and for the price.

"The fool is not the one that does something foolish, but the one that does nothing at all."