Arcady,

For overall versatility, Carrara is the way to go. Hex is a modeler, and does nothing else but modeling and basic UV mapping (but does modeling VERY well). Carrara is a "full" 3D package that does modeling, rendering, physics simulations, trees, landscapes, UV mapping, animation, etc. Carrara also has a very powerfull and easy to use spline modeler, which IMHO is one of the best spline modelers around (the blade, hand gaurd, and handle of the sword in the Eve image were done with the spline modeler).

If you can swing it either by getting the C5 Pro or by buying the plugin, Transposer2 is a great addition if your using Poser because it imports both dynamic cloth and hair. But with the native support for poser figures in C5, your method of importing "static" dynamic cloth from Poser via .obj should work very well. So, with budget being a big concern, you may find that you can easily work around not having transposer.

Clothing Creator could help speed up the generation of basic meshes for cloth, but you can make the meshes manually in Carara, it just takes more time (but a good skill to learn). The clothes above were done by creating basic featureless models in Hex, importing into Poser and using the cloth simulator to drape the cloth over the Poser figure. Exporting the draped mesh back to Hex and adding detail, then exporting back to Poser for use as dyamic clothing. The same procedure could easily be done with C5.

Good Luck!
Rich

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