Max or Maya are in no way a replacement for Poser. Sure, you CAN create realistic models with them - but you have to do EVERYTHING yourself. Starting from modeling, boning, skinning, rigging, IK, lightning. You must be really good or have a professional team at hand to create something as good and versatile as Vicky3 or even better. And you will probably need to buy expensive plugins as well. Good luck!

"SR1 corrected that error in the handbook "

• Great, maybe they could have added the function instead.
  I'm still not sure : I think the 'palette handle' is the
  one on the right side of the screen used to pull the library out in the first place . And
  THIS one was supposed to be dragable (as in Kais Photo Soap for example, if you remember :) ) . What you guys
  described was simply the handle to resize the undocked palette.

Yes, thanks. I came across this new Option too shortly after posting here.

Well, so far it's quite nice what they have been showing.
But I'd prefer some of the weaker points of the program to be vastly
improved or at least reworked :

1. Hair : needs to look more realistic,needs far better handling (see shave&haircut plugin, for example)
2. Cloth simulation : faster, better collision and interaction with hair and forces
3. Face Editor must work for all figures, not just judy and don.
4. More Content 'out of the box' : a real super model figure with enough clothes and hairstyles! (i
   know not very realistic ; but Judy is really ugly.)
5. Material System needs to be improved.
6. I suspect the walk designer will remain largly useless even in Poser 6.

So far what I have seen were mainly improvements in rendering and interface : so we got finally
Opengl; even old Bryce had that for ages.

If it turns out that Poser 6 will only make some cosmetic changes, I really have to think twice
about purchasing.

Just my 2 cents.