Hi All,
For those of you who don't follow the Poser forum, or missed my thread there, I did a little comparison test of rendering times between Carrara 5 Pro running two threads and Poser 7 running two threads. 
Okay, for the scene that I used go here: www.fotoonz.com  (Caboose) 
For the sake of expediency, I used a resolution of 800x618 for this test.

Now, Poser 6 won't render this scene at all, regardless of bucket size. 

Poser 7 took 2 minutes and 56 seconds.

Carrara 5 Pro took 1minute and 38 seconds. Using the TransPoser plugin.

At my usual final rendering resolution of 4000x3090, these numbers would be multiplied by at least 25. 

It might be interesting to try this same scene using the Native Importer, but I'm not sure I want to take the time. More 'toons to do!

Where Carrara REALLY shines in this comparison is when I tried a scene that contained a fish bowl with reflection and refraction turned on. P7 took four times as long as C5 Pro. 
So, I will continue to do almost all my final renderings in Carrara. I'm really looking forward to C6! I'd be much happier not to have to use Poser at all. 

Kind of an apple to orange  comparison isn't this? Sounds more like a poser bash that didn't quite work. You said P7 did render something that P6 couldn't. Sounds like an improvement to me.

Now we all know Carrara renders better. I don't know about anyone else but I don't have the time to try and pose something in Carrara. I will still use poser to put my scenes together then render in my C5Pro if I need to. My Vue6I poses figures much faster than Carrara.

I won't limit myself to just one tool.

That is my opinion and may not reflect the opinions of the popular few.

A Poser bash? No! Not at all. I use it every day. My point was that there's still VERY good reasons to be using Carrara in addition.
I use all sorts of different 3D programs. Amapi,  Lightwave3D, Blacksmith, Vue5... Whatever is best for what I need to do at the moment. 
Poser 7 is indeed a big improvement from Poser 6. The point of the post was: If anyone was curious whether Poser's rendering abilities have caught up to C5's? They haven't. 
I do virtually all my scene setting in Poser, all my rendering in Carrara, all my morphs in Lightwave, and most of my 3D design in Amapi. I haven't used Vue5 Infinite much. Every time I've tried to load a Poser scene into it, it chokes. Is Vue6 better in that regard?

Vue6I is like a different app the way it is improved and even the pre release has worked better than V5 out of the box. Also as I had said , poses your figures faster. It uses poser to do it's thing.

The way I see it, both Carrara5Pro and Vue6I do things the other doesn't so it's very handy to have both. 

I was just teasing you about the Poser bashing. I use many different apps for my works too.

Yes, they all have their strengths. I've been interested in the Vue6 Xstream thing for a while now (to Lightwave). I can't really afford the upgrade quite yet, though. Still have the Xmas bills to pay.
It'll be interesting to see the path that Carrara takes, now that DAZ has purchased it. Hopefully it'll keep the good Poser integration and expand on C5's current capabilities. Carrara has helped me out a lot in the past ten months.
Happy New Year!

The next carrara version will give us an idea of what will happen to it's future. I Don't use DS so if it goes the way of Bryce, I won't need to upgrade. C5Pro will be good enough for a few years. I need a new computer soon so we shall see. Unless Daz does the same thing they did with Bryce6 and gives me C6Pro for $6.

Forgot to mention that Vue6 can use Poser shaders because of the way it uses poser to do it's thing. Now it's up to Daz to improve Carrara.

Now, Poser 6 won't render this scene at all, regardless of bucket size. 

Looking at the scene I somehow do find that very very hard to believe. I've done way larger scenes with Poser 6 without a problem.

Anyway going back to your comparisment, to me it's pretty much worthless showing some figures, you need to show the rendered results also. Showing images and times gives us a good comparisment. For all I know even though the C5 rendered image may look terrible. It also depends a lot on the settings. It's hard to compare rendered times if you don't give the used setting also.

*If anyone was curious whether Poser's rendering abilities have caught up to C5's? They haven't. 

*To be honest, I do find P6's rendering abilities far beyond the ones of C5. Just looking at your gallery and toonz it seems to me you haven't even tapped into P6's real rendering capacities. While C5's rendering capacities are great, I find them to be a let down when it comes to the final results. I've used them for a while, but when it comes to rendering Poser scenes, I've returned to the Poser 6 for rendering.

Well, in that case, you should definitely stick to rendering in P6. I bought C5 Pro last February because of the trouble Poser was giving me regarding texture memory. I had a great many scenes that I couldn't render regardless of what size I set the bucket to. I've had far fewer such problems with C5, although it has a texture memory limit too. It's just higher. Also, I find C5's rendering quality to be superior. Your mileage may vary.  I haven't hit P7's texture memory limit, yet, but I've only been using it for a couple of weeks. I had one scene that grossly exceeded the texture memory of BOTH C5 and P7. I was finally able to render it in C5 by exporting a large group of the scene props from P7 as .obj's, and importing them into the scene in C5. I think that worked because obj material files don't store multiple copies of the same texture map if it's used by 100 copies of the same prop. Anyway, here's the rendering of the same scene done in P7. With raytracing set to 2 bounces and shadows on. The toon on my site was done in C5 with raytracing set to 8 bounces. Pixel accuracy set to 0.5, sharpness set to 100%, and shadow accuracy set to 1 pixel.

Poser 7 and Carrara 5 Pro were both set to run two threads, incidentally. 
That's a BIG improvement for P7 over previous versions.
OOps!!! I just noticed that I linked to the wrong page! Sorry about that! Sheesh, I'm losing my mind. The comparison I did was with  www.fotoonz.com/FoToonZ/Accounting.html
I left the last part off the original link. 
Again, I apologize for the confusion!   [whacks self in forehead]
Actually I DID do a comparison with the "Caboose" toon, too, but they both rendered so quickly at low resolution that I felt it would be better to use a scene that was more intricate. Sorry for the brain fart. :blink:

I have both Poser 7 and Carrara 5 pro but I have not been able to move Poser 7 files via the transporter into it.  Do I understand from this discussion that you have been able to do that without the Poser 6 work around?

No, unfortunately not. I'm using Poser 7, but only using objects which reside in my Poser 6 Runtime. In other words, you can create the scene in Poser 7, but Carrara has to be pointed at the Poser 6 runtime at the moment. 
I haven't tried creating something in Poser 6 that points to the Poser 7 Runtime, yet. I suspect that C5 wouldn't like that either.
Hopefully, DAZ will release a fix for this problem soon!
Gordon

*"Hopefully, DAZ will release a fix for this problem soon!"

*Right. Like thats going to happen. The dreaded Daz Soon.

Well, this problem could be a deal breaker for someone considering C5 if all they have is Poser 7. From a business point of view, I'd think they'd be working overtime on a patch.  That could just be wishful thinking, though!

I was laughing at the Soon part.  Best laugh I've had the last few days.