Now this is the best I could do: D/S - Perspective view, 3 lights, 2 spot lights in the back of her and 1 point light below her (default position) This is the only hair I could get to stay on her head. V3, Daz's texture maps High, with makeup. Morphing Dress, balcony doors behind her. Poser 4 - Main Camera view, same lights, 2 spots behind her one in front towards the bottom. Lights make a huge difference. Now in D/S, I could not get any body part imported, some kind of error, so her forarms I could not move, had to get a straight regular pose. Obviously her eyes and lips are way to lite up, but if I was to chose, I kind of like D/S, if I could do something with her eyes and lips. What do you all think? Sharen

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I really did nothing to the hair other then fit in D/S and conform in Poser, for some reason it looks wider in D/S, maybe it is the perspective view that does that, or it is D/S's way it handles this hair?

Oh yes, D/S took 12 minutes to render, Poser took 37 seconds.

Outside of the lips on the DS, DS looks better overall. Eyes and neck definition are real good. Poser looks sort of flat. I don't know how well defined the mesh is on the bodice but it does not show up on the DS render. DS has a love affair with hair transmaps and doesn't want to leave LOL. I've noticed that is where the major slowdown is.

They really do look quite different. Sharen

For the front spotlight in Poser 4, set both opening angles to 180 (you need to edit the limits to get over 160) and set a non-zero value for "dist end". That'll give it a more pointlight-like character to allow better comparisons.

I have one too. Except mine's P5 and DS. I really prefer the DS render. I used one sun light in DS and RDNA HDRI lighting in Poser. I couldn't get the Skydome and the tree to work in DS (Skydome the textures apply incorrectly, tree crashes the program on render). One interesting thing to note is that poke-through occurs in Poser but not in DS.

I dont know what you are seeing nicked, but the Poser pic looks better to me. The skintone, lips, and the background are better in the P4 image. The hair looks about the same, save for the almost clumpy look by the ear in the D|S image. The eyes are a close call too. They are a little too bright in the D|S image. The shadow on the neck of the shirt in the D|S image looks like it should be there, but doesnt look natural. Overall, the D|S image looks kinda plain.

Great attempt by both of you (Sharen and redon634) but this is why I stay away from such comparisions. It is a combination of "subjective" opinions I think and very difficult to make "objectively scientific". I remember the same sort of thing happened when Vue 3 came out and people wanted Vue 3 to Bryce 4 "Side By Side". Naturally nearly all Brycers picked the Bryce version as best and Vuers the Vue version. Each comparision depends on software skill level with each product and often "subconciously prejudicial" choices can be made, even if not conciously intentional. Who's "better" the Marlins or the Yankees? -is their really a scientifically "unbiased" answer to that? There will be lots more "Daz Studio vs Poser" comparisions like this coming, I'm certain it will be more of a fun sport, than anything. But I'm not knocking people's efforts here, as while it may not determine a real "best-winner", it does give people an idea that DS offers a NEW choice that will be different from Poser. And if you like that look better, then that's what you will use DS. If not, you will use Poser. (Both use different renderering technologies too, which also makes a real Apples to Apples comparison difficult).

Another interesting thing to note (can't remember who it was...maclean?): someone said they couldn't get DOF to work in DS but Sharen's DS render looks like it has a real short DOF. Also, there is clearly a focal length difference in the two renders.

Decided to see if I could get a little closer to the same setup, as Sharen did. In this one I think I'd pick the Poser render. Like Veritas says, however, I'll use them both depending on what I want.

Hey, that's pretty good! Meaning that- I am NOT EVEN SURE which is which!

D|S may make an attempt to load the light settings that come in a Poser Scene, but that doesn't mean those or the RIGHT settings. Same can be said for the surfaces, which by the way I've had D|S screw up on me so that surface names end up in funny places. Bug Report was filed. If you are lucky enough to get a scene to load into D|S, you should re light it and tweek the surfaces. DAZ|Studio's lights are an order of magnitude better than Posers, but you need to learn to work with them just like you needed to figure out Poser lights when you first loaded Poser. The Camera's also work a bit differently. And lastly... you are comparing an ALPHA release to products that have been out for a year or 4 in P4's case.

Ratteler makes some good points. The distant (infinite) lights seem to be a fairly close match, but if you start adding spot lights and point lights (which Poser doesn't have) then you're going to be adding more variables. As for the cameras, I tried for a long time to get these two images close to the same focal length, but ultimately, was unable to. Material (surface) settings are also treated differently, so by the time you change shaders, specular settings, bump settings, adjust lights and camera settings, it's really really hard to do any kind of meaningful comparisons. Ultimately, aside from some specialized features (micro-poly subdivision, soft-shadows, sub-surface scattering, sub-poly displacement mapping, image-based lighting (HDRI), etc) you'll find that most of these rendering apps are about on-par with each other in regards to the 'quality' of the render... the real value is in the tools the app provides and how easy/hard it is to achieve those results (what 2d/3d file formats are supported? Does the UI enchance or detract from your workflow? Is it easier to rig/pose/light/compose a scene in one app than another? etc.). So... the comparison question boils down to additional feature sets - given equal user-operational-knowledge in both apps, P5 CAN produce a better looking image than P4 because (for example) it does micro-poly subdivision. The skin lighting model (again, for example) may or may not turn out to produce better images than what's available in P5, but we won't know that until D|S is shipping and people learn how to use it effectively.

OK I have one too. D/S on the left. The model is V3 Glamorus Vicki. I imported the figures into D/S separetly not as a pz3, added three point lights and set the surfaces to skin mode. The P5 is one light at roughly the same place as the three D/S ones. The D/S render took 35 min. the P5 one about 5. That`s my only major complaint, that D/S seems to take forever the render transparencies. I have`nt gotten morphs on the clothes to work, and I have`nt been able to bend body parts. The INJ. pose for the face loaded with no problem.

Too bad we can't edit posts (had to say it) - on my last one the P5 render is on the left, DS on the right.

@1Freon1 What I was seeing in the bodice was smooth in DS and textured in Poser. One thing I didn't see was the hair clump. I see it now. I've found the preview sometimes is very misleading- I imported a figure with Netherworks nethergear and it looked like the whole costume was trashed. Rendered fine.

I think it is very difficult to compare the two at this point. You are talking about alpha software compared to full release software. I couldn't make any judgement on it at this point except that DS is almost doing what poser does and its only in Alpha stages.

Took me 3 tries to finally figure out how to get a decent render. First two times I gave up in frustration and waited a day or two before trying again.

Left is DS, right is Poser 4. I gave up trying to get the camera in the same position. One white spotlight in poser with a darker infinity light. Same infinity light in DS with an added white pinlight. This was an imported .pz3 which to my surprise came in really well except the shoulders were horribly bent and I couldn't figure out how to straighten them out. All materials imported perfectly. I did change the skin to skin mode, eyes to glossy and hair to matte before rendering in DS.

I do like the skin tones coming from DS better than the Poser ones. The quality of the jpg saved from DS is rather sucky but I'm sure they'll be fixing that eventually. The TIFF I saved it as the first time didn't work in PSP so I had to switch to jpg.

I am liking DS though now that I've figured out a few things. :)

That's a really good comparison. I think anyone out there who is beginning to figure DS out will start getting good renders with it. It's simply a matter of "learning curve" and spending some time with it. Be sure and file with DAZ Bug Reports or Suggestions on what you would like to see improved so maybe they can get it into the first Beta release. Better lighting controls is high on my list-(like something Vue uses to rotate lights around!)