Hi all, I am very new to 3d, so excuse this question if it seems noobish, because it is :)

I imported a Poser scene to Carrara and rendered it to find that the final render didnt look much like the one in Poser, now I am certain it is fixable by me, but I just dont know where to start, the Poser render is smoother looking, but the Carrara one seems more grainy or bumpy and the models textures have lost their natural look.

Have I done something wrong or is it just a case of learning how to tweak the shaders in Carrara after importing some Poser content?

Both renders were done with a single spotlight pointing at the subject and afaik both renders had ray tracing turned on.

Any advice or insight will be most welcomed.

It's a combination of learning to tweak the shaders and the lighting in Carrara.  I would have to see the original shader bitmaps to be more specific.  Are you using full indirect lighting, and if so, can you send me up a screen-shot of your settings there as well as a screen-shot of the bitmaps for your texture?

One quick suggestion.  Don't use just a spotlight.  Use a general bulb light first, I would suggest a sort of brownish grey color at about 25-30 percent brightness.  Place this one in roughly the same area where your render camera is.  Then add a distance light pointing at the object originating at the point you wish your sunlight or moonlight to come from.  This should be about 70-80% brightness.  Now if you are using a realistic sky for lighting, make sure you insert and properly place a sunlight.  Keep in mind that actual sunlight is not completely white.  It is actually slightly yellow, so set the colors accordingly.  Let me know if this helps.

Thanks for the replies, I suspect that lighting differences as well as shader differences are at play. I basically created the same scene in both P7 and C6 lighting each with a single spot for consistency, I was really testing how well the P7 model and its textures would import into C6. I realize I could play with lighting but that wouldnt give me the comparison I was after.

I guess I dont understand how there was so much of a difference between the two renders, even though I set the scenes up as close as possible to each other. I am still learning this stuff so excuse me if I seem vague, its just that I have a lot more questions than answers :).

At a glance I'd say the bump channel in Carrara is set way too high. That's pretty common in Poser set imports.

Many thanks jt411, I suspected something similar to that.