Quote - I am hoping to get a kinda technical answer in language a non-technical person like me can understand. Why do Poser renders look the way they do and Max renders look the way they do?

To a large degree, what many people perceive as a difference in look is not differences in render engines but rather differences in default settings (esp lights and materials). The goal of a good render engine is not to impose a certain look on an image but rather to truthfully apply the settings that the user chose for surfaces and lights. With only a few exceptions, commercial render engine use pretty much the same principles for the surface and direct lighting calculations. "That Poser look" has barely anything to do with the render engine (after all, FireFly is a completely different engine than the Poser 4 renderer) but rather the default settings for lights and materials that most people don't bother to change. In a similar fashion, people often associate scenes bright uniform ambient light with Bryce simply because Bryce has this as a default - but that doesn't mean that other programs wouldn't be able to use similar lighting or that Bryce can't be made not to render this way. That's not to say that differences between render engines don't exist - but standard methods for surface shading and direct lightings are mostly identical across the board. > Quote - I am jealous of that lucid quality Max renders seem to have. Poser renders seem flatter and more "translucent" than "clear and deep" if that makes any sense.

Can you provide example images of the look you want? The default light set in Poser gives you a comparably dull look. For a quick experiment, take the default light set and set the intensity of all the lights to 170% and see what a difference it makes for your renders.