LaurieA - oh, i'm on the same page.  i'm trying to address the other source of community negativity.  to give an example, i script my own sRGB materials and get pretty realistic results with just P7.  i've tested my lights with regular gibberish workflow, GC linear worflow, and sRGB linear workflow.  if i ever get Poser Pro, i'll be able to add render GC to the testing.  so i'm really familiar with why linear workflow is important, how to light for it, etc. and i learned that here.  only to see others pick it up, turn it on, say they didn't get good results, and decide it must be crap because it didn't magically make their work better and mostly made it look worse.

yes, this is a good idea.  i'm so happy that so many talented and really bright people are interested in getting Poser to support other renderers.  i've been wanting this for years.  but i know using a new renderer, no matter how much better it is than Firefly, will involve someone actually relearning materials.   and for most people in this community, even developers, that won't be an immediate process.  Luxrender, though really impressive, is just not designed for organic renders.  it has a specific car paint material model, but not skin.

in other words, people should not expect to just plug in Luxrender, make no other changes, and get better renders.  they should not assume someone else will solve this problem for them.  nor should they assume a Luxrender plug-in is useless if it can't make good NVIATWAS images right off the bat and with absolutely no change to their scenes.  saying that one can get better results with it does not mean that one will get better results without learning something new and making a little effort.  and if someone doesn't make an effort to learn what's involved with using a new renderer, that person should not claim to know whether or not that renderer is useful or not.

i'm hoping that an open disclaimer at this stage will head off an annoying conflict in the future. ;D

Quote - [ Forget subsusurface scattering, it has very little importance and only adquire some importance for some lights and camera angle and when this happens you must remember that human skin has hair and the hair effect is very much important than SSS.
Is much better to have skin hair and ignore SSS than the opposite.

i guess it depends on what strikes your eye.  i don't find that at all, even slightly.  recently, people were complaining about the sharpness of shadows in Poser.  iirc, it was Stewer who posted a picture of the moon to show that shadows really were that sharp when you don't have ambient lighting.  and the big problem with that is that at this distance, the spread of shading due to SSS is nil.  people notice immediately in just basic objects the lack of SSS (and lights that aren't ideal points). 

i look at a lot of reference photos to do my work.  and maybe you're not noticing the effects of SSS most of the time, but i sure am.  and i have only a very, very, very tiny number of photos where any hair on the skin is relevant at all to my eyes.  i say this having looked for it.  but about 45% of my problems with matching lighting are the abrupt shading of pure diffuse and another 45% are the lack of area lights.

and that doesn't even get into the paper i have on skin shading that shows the effects of several different shading concepts that ended with a result i personally found highly realistic in various lights, but didn't include hair as a consideration at all.
not to mention, imho, SSS is necessary for realistic hair.  but in an odd way, because really it's layered translucence.

but i think we each have our own aspects to skin and shading that we're looking for.  for me, the most important aspect is overall light and shadow, and the most relevant aspect of skin and light interaction that i'm missing right now is SSS.