So I've just been experimenting with the new Poser 8. I think the release of Poser 8 is a milestone in that it is the first time since Poser 5 that the venders have included most of the content within the program rather than doing store-based promotions. The content library from venders such as Vanishing Point, Meshbox, royloo, etc is quite impressive and ranges from an assortment of clothing, materials, new primitive shapes, a vehicle, and props for both scifi and everyday use. Is Poser 8 a big innovation from Poser 7? No. Maybe it's the economy or Smith Micro is afraid that a drastic change to Poser will alienate its hobbyist base. While there are more rendering settings, the only available render engine is still firefly. Features that were desired such as soft body physics, particles, and water are not present. There is no dynamic hair included and most of the included clothing is conforming rather than dynamic. Poser 8 still crashes on my computer and doesn't take advantage of memory as well as it could. Alyson's hair causes Poser 8 to crash on my quad core MAC Pro and it isn't even strand based. Maybe, I've been a little spoiled by Carrara. A feature of its that I like is the ability to consolidate shaders that cover multiple materials so that the material only needs to be edited once. I think the ability to create a material and connect it to multiple sites at once would be an excellent feature for a future version of Poser. The new interface is a little different. I had no problems with the old setup. I think the new version is fairly intuitive enough for most people to get. Be wary of applying materials from in the Posing room as it can apply them to the wrong surfaces. There is still no wacro/setting to turn texture filtering off in master settings so you will have to download stewer's python script. The new figures aren't as bad as what people are saying in the forums. No, they have not been developed to the standard of the DAZ figures. The shoulders are still rather awkward. The default Ryan looks more like the Poser 4 dork than even Don (Poser 5) did. The default Alyson's face is a little too strong, especially in the chin. These figures have more built-in than the G2 line and a lot more options as well. There is better options of blending between the different racial characters as well. It's tough to say whether these figures represent an improvement over the G2 figures - I would just say that they are very different. The face I achieved for Ryan in this image was through the face room. The trick to using the face room is to spawn a morph target and not to apply the morphed head to the figure, which can cause it to distort drastically. With a few iterations of spawned morphs, in conjunction with built-in morphs, you could probably make a pretty decent character for your scene. Ryan's head to body ratio looked a little off, but when the bodybuilder setting is applied, he looks a little more natural. Still experimenting with Alyson, I'll let you know how that goes. On a side note, I had been working on some previews with Michael 4, but when I was updating some files in my runtime I accidently overwrote my entire folder with the new files. I didn't know that Mac's are this touchy about folder updates. For those of you aware of my PC dying, I just took the hard drive to Geek Squad for them to transfer my old runtimes to an external hard drive. I'm just hoping that they don't f&^k it up.