I'm glad someone saw it! (I kinda thought some of those promo images got a little lost on the SM site). I do think IDL is a big step forward for Poser

Having messed with 3dsMax's radiosity some years back (version 5, an age ago!) I'm probably a little more forgiving than some of the xtra time it takes to render using a feature like IDL with reasonably high settings.
With Max's radiosity everything had to be modelled just right, and you still frequently got light and shadow leaks that could ruin a long render. And soooo many settings for radiosity (model, light, material, render) - all needed balancing!

P8's IDL settings (even the more advanced D3D dialogue) are incredibly simple by comparison. In fact I really think we could use just a little more control, but it'd be cool if they just ironed out a few more of the artifact issues.

I'm generally finding that for some lighting situations using an array of lights rather than trying to use ambient materials seems to work better. For example, for flat plane area lights, I'd use a simple array of 4-6 lights with RT shadows and a moderately high shadow blur (see above render). This still seems to render relatively fast on my dual-core machine with IDL enabled - it's more controllable and the bounce light seems more accurate than using ambient materials.

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

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