Excellent post, ynsaen! You were able to articulate what I had been thinking much better than I ever could have. ;-) "and there are several "shortcuts" built into the shader language and Direct X that are used to "fool the eye" -- features which are all already possible in Poser 5, 3ds Max, Lightwave, Pixels3D, Cinema4D, and Carrara -- and have been for some time." You are correct of course. In 3dsMax, for example, as with other applications like Lightwave, you can "bake" the lighting and textures into the model for use in a gaming engine. The same process has been used for many years in the movie industry when lengthy CG/FX shots were called for. I like you, Veritas... you have incredible enthusiasm, and I'm certainly not picking on you. It's just that sometimes your posts remind me of a Don Lapri infomercial at 3am: "I went from painting houses to making $80,000 a week from my one bedroom apartment! And you can do it too if you buy my package!" hehe. (In the case of Don Lapri, I always wondered why, if he was making so much money, did he still live in his one bedroom apartment? LOL. But I digress). :-))

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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.