While the P4 renderer looks very poor for today's standards, I'd say stick with it until you actually have the need for a better renderer. Some of the best Poser images ever have been rendered in Poser 4 - look at the gallery of mec4.com to see some examples. Photoshop is not a renderer, and the renderer of Maya PLE ruins all the fun by adding a huge watermark to your image. Decent renderers in the $0 price would be: POVRAY: A raytracer, for which a program exists that'll allow to render Poser scenes. Unfortunately, I forgot the name. 3Delight/Aqsis/Pixie: All three of them are free RenderMan compliant renderers. Poser 4 has a built-in RenderMan export, File/Export/RIB.... When rendered directly, these files will look about equal to Poser, in cases (e.g. transmaps, shadows) even worse. But if you learn to master RenderMan and the RenderMan shading language (you can find the specs at http://renderman.pixar.com/ and a number books about that in a library), you have truly professional grade tools that can create top-notch images. But for the beginning, I'd say stick to the built-in renderer - before you don't master that, the other renderers will just confuse you.

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: I need some help with poses, hair, clothing and rendering. Please help.