Stewer has a point - default settings do go an awfully long way to determining the image quality. But I don't think it's the WHOLE story.

Momodot, I think the differences you are seeing are partly due to the effort put in, partly due to how difficult the program makes certain things, and partly due to technical differences between renderers.

As Pleonastic says, some people don't care to "fiddle" with lights. (Which to me sounds almost like saying some painters don't like to "fiddle with" drawing or mixing colors. But I guess that's true too.) But to get a great quality render, you must do more than fiddle with lights - you must control them very precisely.

Poser takes its "twist the dials" metaphor for adjusting figure settings and applies it to other objects such as cameras and lights. IMHO, this is a HORRIBLE workflow for lights. Yes, you can get around it, and some people do great work with Poser's lighting, but the fact is that many people stick with default lights 'cause setting up good lighting in Poser is a way more of a chore than it should be. It's difficult to add lots of lights and control them efficiently. It's difficult to make changes to multiple lights, or even select them!

So while Poser makes posing characters easier than it would be in Max, setting up good lighting is much harder. If good lighting in Max = x amount of effort, then good lighting in Poser is more like 4x, 8x or even x^2 amount of effort! And the same may be true of render time. Poser's renderer starts to get quite pokey if you have too many lights in your scene.

I think there are also probably differences in the renderers that also contribute. Speed is definitely one. Having to wait forever to see your product is a big disincentive, especially when Poser's preview is SO far from true to the way the final output will look. Stewer may be right that standard methods are used in all renderers, but I'd imagine the differences come into solving the hard problems - subtle interactions of light, shadow and color; tweaking the engine output to get that extra degree of realism, squeezing every last bit of performance out of the rendering code so that you can render more detail or get results faster... All these things take time and money. You're not likely to get the same performance out of a $200 product that you are out of a $5,000 or $10,000 product.

• Jimdoria  ~@>@