@ diomede:

If you plan to turn Daz Studio into a full-featured 3D app by buying loads of plugins, well I wish you good luck. A much better solution would be to just shell-out $3K or $4K or even $5K to buy Maya, or 3DS Max, or Houdini, or Cinema 4D Studio. It will cost you a lot less, and it will be a lot less headache too.

Daz Studio, even augmented with a ton of plugins, is only a cute toy to play with content. Although it does a very good job at exporting contents into other platforms.

In the affordable price range, worthy replacements for Carrara at this time are Cheetah3D ($99.-, but Mac only), Shade3D ($449.- for the Pro version), and Lightwave ($695.-). This thread is devoted to Shade3D, but I plan to review the other 2 apps as well in the near future, if I have time.