Okay, I like using Poser 6 to setup scenes but when it comes to rendering, Firefly bites!I never seem to get the quality or realism I'm looking for,  and beside - It takes waaaaayyyyy to long to render.  So what I was wanting to know is,  what program out there has the best rendering engines.   I'm looking for something into which I can import my poser scenes,   is relatively inexpensive (although free is better) and that is easy to learn......I'd appreciate any advice you can give. : )

You could try DAZ Studio, which is still free, as far as I know.   I wouldn't expect that to be significantly better (or better at all, actually) than Firefly, though, although it may be faster.   You can import Poser files into Vue or Carrara, although neither will entirely faithfully replicate Poser materials at present (Vue 6 should fix that, but, now that Carrara is owned by DAZ, I'd expect to see Carrara get less Poser-friendly, rather than more).   In my experience, all three can get overloaded by a complex file  (D/S can, too).   Vue 5 Infinite handles memory problems much better than Poser or Carrara.   Carrara seems to slow down on hair (but does a very good job of rendering it).   Vue gets glacial when rendering water, but, again, for my money, nothing touches Vue for renders involving water.   It's also possible that you have Poser settings that are more demanding than are really required.

Attached Link: M2 Gallery w/ Free Posters

My computer at the time would'nt render with Poser 5 much larger than my screen resolution, but Vue  would go 12 - 14 hours at a time, and made the poster you see there! 

One thing I thinig I've come to learn about Poser is to only have one copy of installed on a computer ever!  My last PC had Poser, 4, 5, and six on it.  But I think the they confuse each other.  It was terrible, having a retarded computer as I was first trying to learn Poser 6.  People kept telling me P6 could do this and that, but I never saw a change from P5.  Then I installed P4 to have look at some old files, and from then on the splash screen was always Poser 4 no matter which version I opened. 

Then I bought a new PC and happened to just install and run P6 for a while.  I then noticed a return of the Render performance I was used to.  External Morphs worked for the first time,  and then I noticed how the material room was really supposed to work, and got to wondering...

Thanks for the Advice,  I've tried DAZ studio, and Bryce as well - wasn't too impressed with either of them.   I may need to upgrade my computer (a good excuse as any to buy a new one)  but that alittle out of the budget right now.  So's Vue - and I may not need something quite so fancy.   I have to say this is getting to be a rahter expensive Hobby.....sigh.

I don't know exactly in which area you are trying to achieve realism, but, as far as portraiture is concerned, have you investigated the products by Morris and face_off ?   They aren't free, either, although they are cheaper than Vue.

Attached Link: PoseRay Site

later,

FlyerX

The problem with using an external renderer like Bryce, DAZ Studio or Vue is that you
lose all your Poser shader nodes.  Clouds, noise, blender, color math, those sorts of things.
Though Vue 6 is supposed to be able to incorporate the Poser shader nodes. 
About all that transfers over now is the root material node and image maps.
Also you lose your lights and their settings so you have to set up your lights all over agin.
Does POV-Ray import in the Poser shader nodes and the Poser lights?
Myself I think Firefly is a damn good renderer if it is set up correctly.
In the time it takes to learn another system you could instead be learning how
to use Poser correctly.
Just my opinion.

The gains of using something like Bryce, Vue, or Carrara are worth it however. You can nearly always tell the difference in renders of Poser versus one of these.

If you are using Poser mostly to give yourself a figure with which to insert into a photoshop file for post render work, all you need is Poser. But if you are using it to get figures for complex 3D scenes, you're going to want one of the above apps in which to build that scene rather than Poser.

Shade has by far the best renderer with raytracing, pathtracing, radiosity, GI, distributed rendering (on more than one machine), etc. Best of all, through the included PoserFusion you can directly import Poser figures/scenes and reneder them in Shade. It also offers options to render in QuickTime VR and animation. Shade 8.5 is discounted 50% for Poser users at $99.99

Check out some great renders at  http://www.e-frontier.com/go/shade/galleries

Laslo

Attached Link: http://hof.povray.org/

Poseray will convert Poser objects and lights (except Poser 6's IBL's though you can get the same effect with radiosity).  The image based textures convert with no problem, but the procedural nodes won't.  Pov-ray has it's own procedurals that will do everything Poser's will and more, but they take a little getting used to (there's no graphical interface, only text files).  They can give some amazing results once you get used to them though - I've used Pov-ray procedural textures to put lettering on car tires when I was too lazy to uv-map it.  I think the image and source is still somewhere on my old computer - I can dig it out later if anybody is interested.