As an adage to my earlier post, I'd just like to make it clear that I'm not trying to defend the slowness of Poser renders.

I also use Vue Esprit 5, Shade and Bryce 6 to render, depending on what I need and I wouldn't call any one of them more than 'pig slow' when you start upping the ante on render settings.

There's a lot of hype around at the moment about "increased render speeds" from E-Frontier and e-on software, now they both have new versions being released, but as far as render speeds are concerned I'll wait for solid evidence of that before I believe a word of it.

I've never rendered with the big expensive programmes so I've no comparison to make, especially with the likes of 3DMax.

I'm surprised your HDRI renders are so quick with it. Maybe it IS the money. But I also know for a fact that Vue Pro, or whatever it's called takes around 6hrs to render a fairly minimal  HDRI scene and that programmes not cheap. So how do you figure it?

Seems each programme has it's "good things" which we all want, but they also have their "bad things", like a ridiculous price tag. Pity we can't get all the "good things" in one affordable programme instead of having to have a suite of mid range programmes on our hard drives, each one compensating for the lack of features in the others:)

EDIT: - I've looked into the "Ray" free programmes but I was turned off by them ((looking) not being user friendly), by that I mean it seems everything has to be programmed into them, struck me as being a bit DOSy. But, because of that, I never gave them a try so maybe it's my fault. I don't feel geeky enough for all that. Maybe someone who gets on with it could enlighten me, I'll be happy to be convinced otherwise.

Cheers again.