Actually, Poser does use bones, If you have ever created a poser model, there are serveral things that you must do in order for your model to move correctly. This can be seen while edit inclusion and exclusion angles and blend zones while coverting your model to Poser. Don't be mistaken, poser does use an object skeleton. Metacreations just does not refer to it in Poser. But lets go back futher to the origin of CG animation. 1. There the model based hierachies. I guess we all know about this. The different objects that are attached at pivot points and placed along the body to create the appearance of human and animal motion. The disadvantage to this process was that there were seams in the model at best, and at worst, the object had to be broken up, as it does in Cararra. 2. Morphing came along and it was revolutionary for a while because you could make seamless models and have great animations and very real movements. The disadvantage of this process is that you had to have so objects of that same model for the computer to reference to go from one step to the next. This called for more processing power and slower renders. 3. The advent of Inverse Kinematics. This was the life saver. Now you had the advantage of seamless models and fluid motion without the headache of slow renders because so many objects of the same model existed. Take you mesh and complete it as though it were a sculpture, add an object skeleton and animate it. Now what poser did was took all of the separate object and converted them into a single mesh by welding the vertices and forming a single mesh and that is why when you stretch and object in poser while the centerpoint is out of place it stretches the entire polygon as it would in any modeler. Before you can even start editing a custom object in poser you have to first create a text file for the object hierachy and then the IK chain at the bottom of the text file. Now with the way this operates I cannot exclude the use of an object skeleton or bones in any system of inverse kinematics because anything else would go back to where animation begun. You can create and object hierachy and use constraints and goal objects and not have IK. Because that is where it all began. IK is the manipulation of a SINGLE MESH, not many objects as it is in carrara through the use of a hierarchial skeleton. Now I tried welding vertices in Carrara within my hierarchial chain so that my objects would not break up when I bent the knee for example but everytime I did it, the program crashed with a runtime error. GO figure. And if you read all of this I commend you.