To my knowledge, VRay is not part of 3ds max but costs additional $299 to $799. I have never used Vray (I don't own 3ds max), but I'd be very surprised if it were able to deliver displacements at speeds similar to a REYES renderer while still retaining it's raytracing speed. I can only gather information from web sites, and there I read things like " Displacement really is a hog on the system so it will require a healthy dose of.. patience." Yes, it does tax the system a bit. Using GI with micropoly displacement will slow down the initial calculation, but by saving the irradience map to a file and reusing it, it can help speed things up for animations. I haven't noticed a drastic speed decrease when using displacement without GI. Also, Vray is an additional purchase, but MentalRay is now shipped as part of 3dsMax. Anyway, getting back to Poser... when you save an animation as TIFF images, will it retain the alpha info for shadows as well as the objects themselves? And is there a way to do network rendering with Poser scenes? If so, then that would change the way I use the software, and would make me try it more for production purposes. I know you can't render the scene to elements (IE., seperate the specular, diffuse, and shadow channels into seperate render passes), but for compositing purposes, it would be convenient to have the shadow information retained in the alpha channel. Then again, it probably isn't possible, since Poser doesn't have matte surface materials, and MUST render the "ground" as an object in order to have shadows cast on it at all. What I need is the ability to cast shadows from a figure onto the "ground", but not render the ground, just the figure and shadow. In Max, all I have to do is apply a matte material to the ground, and then it accepts shadows and reflections, but will not render as an opaque object in the alpha channel, which allows me to composite the resulting render frames seamlessly into a video background.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.