I find long diatribes like this utterly fascinating, and normally do not get involved in some of the more lengthy ones. However, I would like to point out that the good folks at DAZ (with whom I have no affiliation - except that they have consumed much of my plastic in the past)use LIGHTWAVE - not only for rendering, but also for animations. I have personally successfully used Poser 4 characters with and without animation in LW 7.5 on both PC and Mac and have written tutorials on how to do it. Get a copy of LW 5, 6, 6.5, 7, or 7.5 - the Poser->LW plug-in works fine with all of those versions. You don't import Poser figures saved as .obj, .dxf, .txt or whatever alphabet soup into LW - you open the .pz3 files, just like within Poser. LW, with the aid of the CL plug-in, translates the figures into native .lwo objects and .lws scenes. If you don't like the herky-jerky walk (which may smooth out in LW), design your own in LW and then animate. Ok, back to my hole under Middle Earth now... -scara