"BTW, if you read the interview to the "wonderful life" short, it was lit with 26 spotlights - no GI, no IBL/HDRI." That's true, Stewer, but let's not forget... you can do things with 3dsMax lights that you can't do with Poser lights. For instance, the ability to set certain lights as "ambient only", so as to better simulate light bounce, or indirect lighting without having that same light affect specular or diffuse portions of scene objects. Not saying you can't get realistic lighting without that feature, but it certainly helps. ;-) Also, I'm sure he rendered the movie in passes, something which you can't do in Poser, but makes it much easier to adjust and tweak the movie in post. For instance, rendering just the specular ,diffuse, shadows, etc. to seperate layers for post compositing. Also other G-buffer information like Z-depth can be saved for deep postwork in AfterEffects or Combustion or other video FX editors. I'm not saying Poser can't achieve realism on its own, but just pointing out some of it's deficiencies. When we see people creating highly realistic lighting for video in other high end apps, and they don't use GI or advanced lighting techniques, we need not forget they usually have tools at their disposal which make that process much easier than it would be in Poser directly. ;-)

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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.