Hi idocatrudiaris,

As the others have indicated, there are ways to get Poser scenes into some of the best renderers. I briefly tried Vue 5 and found it to be a bit buggy and still quite limited in terms of the overall scene complexity that could be imported.

When I pass a certain complexity of scene in Poser 6 (usually three or four figures), I know that the firefly renderer will probably break, when I try to render, because the stupid thing tries to keep everything in memory.  Unless you drastically reduce the rendering quality and the texture sizes, there is just no way that the firefly renderer will cope. When this limitation is reached, I turn to POV-Ray as a renderer and use FlyerX's excellent PoseRay scene converter (both are free and the results are usually very good and produced relatively quickly).

The following is from an earlier posting, and might help you to get started if you want to try the PoseRay/POV-Ray combination as an alternative renderer.

Here are some of my experiences with POV-Ray and PoseRay:

The good points of using POV-ray and PoseRay are:

• Both tools are free.
• PoseRay will import P5 lights, camera and scene from a PZ3 and the geometry from an exported wavefront .obj + .mtl.
• POV-Ray handles full size textures without problems and is quite a fast renderer.
• Radiosity is supported (although I have not had great experiences with the default settings as it sometimes seems to overdo the illumination for multiple area lights and produce "smudged" skintones).
• PoseRay has area (actually multi-point volume) lights that can produce quite nice "jittered" shadows.
• You can get many Millenium figures rendered in a single scene (I have been informed that 12+ is possible) although I have only done 8 so far.
• PoseRay/POV-Ray have some nice standard materials for metals, glass, stone and water.

The bad points are:

• No built in materials (via PoseRay) for clothing textures in POV-Ray - so you need to used textured and bumped clothes. POV-Ray has procedural shaders but these are only accessible by command line and need to be learnt.
• You need to be sure everything is where it needs to be and everyone is looking in the right direction because there is no easy way to change things after exporting the scene from Poser.
• Poser 5 export to wavefront obj is a bit broken so textures seem to get messed up. P6 export is much better but "Preview" materials can get muddled up.
• Poser material shaders are not supported.
• Preview lights and the final rendered image have slightly different (but somewhat predictable) illumination levels.
• This is a multi stage process, i.e.
  a) P6 export to wavefront obj (creates an .obj and a .mtl file).
  b) Save the PZ3.
  c) Import these into PoseRay.
  d) Go through materials list to replace those that used complex P5 shader materials - simple textures, transparencies and bumps are mostly OK but reflections are handled differently. Watch for opportunities to use metalic reflections and nice POV-Ray metals AND glasses.
  e) Use geometry/uv tool to weld vertices (and smooth) for any figures that need it - especially if the figures are nekkid. If you don't do this there can be jagged shadows at the boundaries of material regions. I generally do this smoothing as follows: Select [tick boxes] only a figures neck, torso, legs, feet, arms, hands and fingers using the geometry selection list. Have everything else unticked. Select the weld vertices and smooth options and then do update. Don't forget to re-select everything for the preview (and for the final render).
  f) Check everything looks ok in preview, and then
  g) Save and render using POV-Ray.

I tend to use native PoseRay lights rather than poser ones because I think they give me more control and a nicer illumination. I don't think P6 IBL lights are supported.

Example of P6 scene => PoseRay => POV-Ray at
http://excalibur.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1098936
I have a few more examples in my Gallery but they have mostly nekkid characters.

You can get PoseRay at:
http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/

and POV-Ray at:
http://www.povray.org/

Regards,
Jovial.