Quote - ....... I do a lot of jumping between c4d, modo, vue, poser pro and carrara. Regarding shader import, even if all the shaders have been converted to texture maps instead of procedurals, the shaders have to be 'fixed' in the receiving program.....
Mark

Hey Mark,
You sound like me, trying to find a good combination of programs that work well together.
My primary goal is to find a rendering program that will import Poser (Daz) characters and render them better than Poser AND is easy to manipulate.

I never liked Poser's UI.  Moving characters and cameras was always a "pulling hair out" experience for me.  Daz Studio came along and I thought it was the answer, it's interface allowed much easier posing and camera movement, but it's so full of bugs and limited export potential, I've finally moved back to Poser.

I used to use Poser -> Carrara to render.  So I was excited when the latest version came out.
But I'm kind of dissapointed.  I like the way Vue renders Poser characters (not to mention the superior natural scenes you can create).  So when I went back to Carrara, the skin textures of the Poser characters seem very flat and dull.

On the plus side, Carrara handles multiple Poser characters much more easily than Vue.  Vue gets bogged down very easily, even on my 64bit machine with 8 GB of ram.

So, I guess I'm having a spiritual crisis of sorts when it comes to what software to use as my regular everyday tools.  I want something that imports characters well, is easy to manipulate and renders well.
Why can't I have it all in one package?!?!  LOL!