I have to agree that from what I've seen, Poser, even Poser 4, can do better looking portraits than you can get 'out of the box' with POVRay. The key is 'out of the box.' Os others have said, I don't think there have been enough experienced POVRay folks using Poser or vice versa to judge the real potential of the renderer with Poser figures. For that matter, the number of POVRay renders focusing on the human figure seems to be in the minority. I've played with BMRT, 3DLight, etc. and without knowing how to really use them, the results don't look appreciably better than Poser. It will be interesting to see what happens as Shade becomes more Poser compatible since that renderer can do some stunning architectural scenes. You'd think that E-Frontier would rather stick with one renderer rather than licensing Firefly. I don't know nearly enough about rendering technology to say but I'd guess that any number of applications out there can do a good job on Poser stuff it's a matter of how hard it is to accomplish. FireFly wasn't designed for Poser either. PoseRay has done a great job of making the Poser to POVRay path much easier and it get's better with every release, not to mention features like HDRI and subdivision. It's also a great tool for loading and converting .3DS and Lightwave models. Currently, the support for tweaking native POVRay features is rather limited but that may change. POVRay at it's heart though is script driven and it would take a hellacious GUI effort to overlay that.

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