Is there a benchmark Best of Class rendering engine for poser scenes? I know there are lots out there, but in the opinion of the users on this forum, what is the absolute best (regardless of cost) rendering engine that can be used to render Poser 7 scenes to get maximum realism.

I would be interested to see any samples comparing a scene rendered in Poser 7 and the same scene rendered with an external engine, in order to measure how much difference the extra effort and cash makes to the final product!

Thanks

Kinda depends on what sort of scenes you want to do and how much effort you are willing to put into the whole thing.

I personally use XSI/mentalray to render poser stuff and my own scenes. For me it's the most flexible solution. But people who do lot's of environments may need something like Vue or those doing interiors may prefer VRay. There's also the question of how seamless a connection you want with poser. If you just want to drop a scene and render then C4D is probably the best option.

Quality wise, all of them outdo poser. Even the free ones.

I like both MAX & Carrara myself.  Both offer such crispness and clarity that Poser's Firefly just can't compete with.

I currently only have 2 images in my gallery here (I'm always deleting everything and rebuilding) but they both were rendered in MAX9 and I really like the quality of the lighting, shadows and realism.

Carrara imports Poser scenes perfectly and it's lighting outshines (LOL!) Posers 10 to 1!  Same with MAX but takes a little more work with the materials as they usually need some tweaking after coming out of Poser.

Gerard

p.s. don't look at my gallery pics if large breastedness scares or offends you!!  

Thanks for the reply ghonma, I absolutely would want to drop a scene into the third party app to render, I dont mind paying for a plugin but I dont have the time or experience to start faffing around with redoing textures and lighting etc, it must import to the application I want to use without any drama.

My goal is to create realistic scenes that I can set up and render within poser and then take the whole scene and render it with a suitable high quality renderer for the final image. I am not planning on any animations yet, just still scenes. I dont mind using multiple third party products if some are more suitable say for darkly lit moody internal scenes or perhaps another renderer for bright wide open landscapes, I just dont know whats good, whats crap, whats fantastic and whats easy...

cheers.

@nobrot,

if time *and *budget weren't a consideration and you wanted to go "bleeding edge", PRman:

(1) Proven industrial strength, nearly non-crashable command line render engine responsible for several movies over the past 20 years.

(2) Poser outputs RIB, which is PRman's native file format.

(3) rendertime geometry swapping (low-res for previews / high res for renders) is quite possible the coolest thing ever

But....

(4)is exceptionally fast (especially motion blur / depth of field) but only with careful and thorough pre-production.

(5) the learning curve is daunting, but well worth it IMHO.

(6) shading / texturing requires a separate program or the ability to code / compile shaders and textures.

$0.02

I did a little research, and it seems that PRMan is available for Maya, I wonder if that would take some of the complexity out of it, ie just import the Poser scen into Maya and then render from within Maya using the PRMan plugin??   worth more investigation I think, thanks for the heads-up replicand!

https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/rfm_webinfopage.html

whichever render engine you use you are probably going to have to do some tweaks to the textures etc, especially procedural ones because they don't translate between apps at all

LOL! Not happy with Poser? Throw a little $7000 Maya on the fire!

ghelmer   sorry but I am finding Poser's lighting superior to Carrara for raytraced soft shadows, AO and skin shaders. I am totally converted back to PoserPro from Carrara.

[I fully admit that I am currently also repelled from Carrara by the lack of hair and cloth in C. But having said that, I honestly will put Poser up against any Carrara soft shadow raytrace scene.]

I spent two days in the "sun" room of Carrara. It is cool. But that whole realistic sky GI thing is a different category, which Poser does not have. So tip of the hat to Carrara there; however, the Carrara GI is NOT anywhere in the same league with Cinema, Max, Modo etc.

I can't post a render right now (at work at lunchtime) of the excellent Poser raytrace soft shadows + skin but would be glad to do so later tonight if you care.

::::: Opera :::::

I wasn't suggesting Renderman For Maya mainly because....Poser  content and RfM sort of work against each other. Specifically PRman / RfM prefers NURBS and subDs over polygons, and texture maps should be square;  it's only when you start digging deeper into its functionality that you will see speed gains. Global illumination is a perfect example because at first the workflow appears very cantankerous; but you can do all sorts of crazy things like caching your raytrace calculations, as an example.  If you wanted to try this workflow, you could download evaluation versions of both Maya and RfM which are fully functional but watermarked. 

I was basically referring to any Renderman compliant renderer, specifically those that run off the command line. There are many to choose from: Pixie, Air, 3delight (free with DAZ studio BTW) and of course PRman. Export RIBS from Poser, use a third party app to edit and attach shaders (which could be done by hand), import RIBs into Rman compliant renderer.

I'll second the comment of procedural shaders; they don't transfer.

You could try Maxwell Render, or FryRender, both unbiased render engines. Both so precise that they are slow.

there are also several free non-biased renderers: Kerkythea, Sunflow, Indigo, etc.  i know Kerkythea can do both biased and non-biased.