Hi, I have just returned from a business trip to japan and it seems that while they are very much in realistic rendering of human characters for their anime stuff (some of it is actually pretty sick) over there the predominent software they use for it is a program called "Shades". They even sell "character packages" in regular software outlets that can be used with that software. However, from looking at the description on the box "Shades" seems to be more of a general-purpose 3D modeling software with not much "poser like" functionality. Can someone from that region maybe shed some more light on that... Does Shades have feature that put it into competition with Poser? Thanks, Guido