Lightwave is good value at the moment
With a free copy of DFX+ and a free upgrade to version 8.
The Duo Dongle meants that you get both a PC and Mac version although the Digtal Fusion DFX+ will only work on a PC
if you are a student the educational licence is cheap
if i had the money i would buy Messiah Studio ,it costs 995US Dollar and has a very very good renderer(Arnold).
Motion Builder is good too,but they dont have the personal edition anymore and the new version costs 995US Dollar too,but the renderer is not so good.
Im buying Poser 5 next month,this must be enough for me at the moment.
Here is what I have found out. I bought Poser because I saw people here using it. I looks great for posing the built in charecters, but for making your own skeletons it is needlessly complicated. After you draw and place bones you have to set fall off zones, and rotation orders and a bunch of crap. No matter what I try my mesh rips apart.
On the other hand, yesterday I was cleaning off my computer and was about to trash an old demo version of Carrara Studio 2. I had never tried the bones in that program. I imported a Zbrush model (fully textured) and added bones. Carrara automatically attached the skelleton and I could pose my model easily with only very minor adjustments.
If the next version of Zbrush does not have bones or some way to pose models I am going to switch to Carrara 3 for my main layout and rendering program. I will still use Z to texture and build organic models but it’s not worth the trouble to do everything in Zbrush itself.
Shaun
Poser may be complicated, but then its ease of use with animating characters more than makes up for it. It also has character weighting, which adds a lot to a pose (or animation). I tried to use, and enjoy Motionbuilder, but it drove me completely mad trying to get it to do even the simplest of things. I can see all of the good things it can do, but trying to convince the program to do them was like trying to solve a rubik’s cube blindfolded. The program and I did not agree, and going back to Poser was like a breath of fresh air.
I used Poser 4 once(without propack) to create a figure I modeled in Zbrush. It took me about 2 weeks to figure out how to do it. I feel your pain. With the added feature in Poser 5, it looks like it should be easier now to rig a character, but I feel that it will still take 2 full days, after you learn the new features to rig a character in this app. I am still debating about buying the update. Maybe if it had a normal mapping shader, or whatever Poser calls it, I might drop the cash.