Although I've been using progs like PS for yonks, I'm really new to 3d apps and I was wondering if there's a way of combining my Poser figures with my Bryce environments. If I am able to bring my Poser figures into Bryce, will they retain there materials, maps etc? Can I bring Bryce objects into Poser so that I can then apppy a skeleton? Also I looking to purchase a more all-round prog eg Maya, D, Lightwave, Money is not really a problem but I don't want to have to buy/learn another prog in a years time. I'm using OSX on a G5 What would you recomend? Thanks in advance :o)

Personally I recommend Cinema 4d, I'ts easy to import/export, has a user-friendly interface and is priced reasonable. Check out the c4d forum and galleries to get a better idea. Furthermore, there are numerous plugins that will allow you to import you poser characters with little effort. (At least a lot less effort than bryce)

Daz has a plugin that lets you import quite easily from Studio to Bryce. Since Studio is free I would recommend popping over there and downloading that. If you do your posing in Poser save the pose, you can reload it into Studio and export from there. That's much easier than exporting an obj from Poser and picking groups in Bryce and reassigning materials. And, stay tuned, Daz is ramping up to release Bryce5.5 which should make the whole process even better (we all hope). While my home 3D experience began with Poser and Bryce, I have now included Lightwave 8. Really powerful, proffesional app but make no mistake, due to the more you can do the more time you can spend learning to do it. Don't know anything about C4D, so I can neither recommend or disuade. good luck

Also look at Vue 5. You can bring Poser stuff directly into it. The biggest thing with all these programs is two-part. Your real expense is time + money + learning curve (how much hair will you lose in frustration). I was using DKB (now known as POV) because it was free and my employer wouldn't spend the $3000 to get a 3d program with visual aids such as GUI... so I built my spaceships in code and rendered repeatedly. My time saved would have paid for that program! I was the only artist on the floor with a drafting background, so at least I could use it. Spend enough to get something workable, but not so much of a hog that you need to spend another couple thousand on a year-long class. The other part of the equation concerns what you want to render... what specific effects are you after? If you are doing large outdoor scenes flooded with sunlight, Maya has about the worst and weakest lighting of the bunch... and you'll want Lightwave or something with decent radiosity. If you are generating characters for animation, you'll want something with easy rigging and lots of morph capabilities. If you are rendering still-lifes or interiors, you'll want a true ray-tracer so that your crystal doesn't look like plastic. Large trade shows (such as MacWorld next week) usually have booths staffed with techy guys as well as sales people, so you can ask the engineers some hard questions and get a feeling for the support levels behind the products. You can also get free demo disks for most of these products so that you can test the interface. Carolly