EvoShandor, Poser is definately for professional use! The major flaw is the internal renderer, so final output should be in another program if you are making movies. However, for posing, visualizing, and animating it is capable of solving a lot of problems very quickly in industries where time is essential. What concerns me here is the learning process, and whether Poser would make it too easy to circumvent some of the decisions which must be made. Randy, Poser is unique, although other programs are starting to overlap its features. It is like Bryce in that you can get a passable image within minutes... before spending the better part of a week perfecting it. There are lots of dials and morph targets for the more advanced figures: tweaking is easy if you already know what to look for. Let's use an obvious example... "Cowboy Mike". Most people here simply dress him in cowboy duds, and pose him with a preset pose from the library. He doesn't look like a cowboy to anybody who has been near a ranch, but it is good enough and fast: within a day you can find plenty of props, clothes, poses, make your selections and render up a scene. If you have some experience and a good eye, you'll know that walking in heels changes the stance and the stride, riding a horse for years permanently affects the legs, and sitting on heels with spurs under the haunches because of the absence of chairs on the range gives a man balance... ALL will affect that cowboy's walk and stance even if he is wearing a tuxedo. He'll probably have a plug of tobacco in his cheek, squint lines from the sun (I have yet to see a cowboy wearing sunglasses), and fingers gnarled from roping cattle and tying barbed wire... these will affect the subtle movements of hands and head. So lets take "Cowboy Mike" and put him in Poser's Walk Designer... within seconds you have a 30 frame walk cycle... but it isn't a cowboy's walk. The dials say "power walk", "shuffle", "sneak", "strut"... but they don't say "bow-legged hobble on heels". An animator will have an idea of what makes a walk furtive or sexy and can set up key frames and proper transitions in the animation palettes to recreate Coburn's walk in "Waterhole #3"... but will your son be tempted by the easy way out or would he wrestle a graph to the ground in order to get the right look? Carolly