vray is a good renderer. it is fast with global illumination,glossy reflections and good skin shaders.

my question now is if it would be possible to make a plug in for Poser.

i know that you are now asking yourself if it would even be practical to have an expensive renderer for Poser. well Vray standalone costs  € 245. and for that money you get 10 (!) licenses for Distributed Rendering. for that money you get realistic rendering that is not like unbiased renders that are very slow. its very biased but it supports GI,soft reflections and subsurface scattering.

so if you would have already poser you would need to spend extra 245 euros for a renderer.

could this be done? i thin poser users would use this.

I've used vray, and while the results can be genuinely astonishing, I've found it an extremely complictated system to master with any degree of consistant results. In my case, I suppose it could be just a matter of another boob complaining about the lack of the coveted "make art" button....I don't know.

I've complained about Firefly's shortcomings often here in the Poser forum, and would readily agree to a replacement, but I'm not sure vray is the answer. If there are any technical geniuses out there, I reckon your forune would be made if you could create a reasonably user friendly rendering engine that would appeal to hobbyists as well as pros, had a comprehensible user interface and didn't require a manual over a five hundred pages long.

Is that too much to ask for? Probably. Maybe all I really need is a Krell brain boost.

"my question now is if it would be possible to make a plug in for Poser."

yes. it is. see, you've been working with the basis of such a plugin for months...... 3 guesses what?

interesting.

IMHO Firefly is not that bad at all, with the proper settings, toolkit (like Advanced Render Settings), anything advanced like DoF done in post, and gamma correction taken out of the JPG textures. For a $200 pack, that is. From Maya ($4000) I would expect more indeed.

Any XYZ renderer to my understanding will require XYZ-cameras, XYZ-lights and XYZ-materials to do the job. Cameras should work and Poser lights might do externally. But how do we get VRay-lights (like the outdoor dome and sun) into Poser? Materials are fine for the usual channels. But how to get the Vray materials into Poser? And how to get V-ray making velvet from Posers alternate diffuse channel?

In 3DSMAX one has to choose between mental ray and V-ray before (!) texturing and lighting the scene at all. Is that what we expect? So a Poser plugin sounds pretty brave to me.

And what exactly is the sense of using a limited $200 scene builder (or half the price, every now and then) for feeding a $250 renderer? Just asking.

Because I'm curious what makes people expect $4000 functionality from a $200 piece of software. Of course we can ask, no harm done. As I continue to ask my garage to make my car look, feel, sound and drive like a Ferrari, without raising the price. Haven't got it yet, unlucky me.

Keep on Posing

the thing is that i have some info from a forum (i will not give the link).

the rumor is that the Vray plug in for Maya DEMO has inside the Vray standalone app. the standalone is enough to render stuff. but you need a software that  supports the standalone vray.

so i was thinking. if this is true that the demo version has the standaloen version, that you need for rendering we would be able to use vray for free without paying any extra money .

get it? ;)

well the answer is yes, it can be done.

the aim of the Luxpose project was eventually that it could be used to output to more render engines given the specs of that render engine.  it would just be a case of changing the output of the script.

but as you see atm....

Yup, it's called Blender :)

The Demo for VRay for Maya has already expired and will no longer work (I know, I used to use it)

Awesome lets get together an Ad HOC team of Forum "Gurus" and start hacking out an Exporter to Vray we will call it"Vraposer" and ...

Seriously though I Like Vray For C4D
Nearly All of the renders in my REAL
** GALLERY** are Vray with some Maxwell  on some of the recent stuff.

I am a bit of a render engine junkie.
Vray Forces you to use Vray Mats
and comes with its own  Material converter as long as your materials are image/bitmap based.
if that stand alone Vray you mentioned Supports Collada that might be a possibility for poser"pro" users.

Cheers

Just asking:

is V-ray standalone a product which can be bought as such (I couldn't find it on the V-ray website), or is the Vray for sketchup/maya/max/c4d/... just able to use .vrscene files which are exported by other tools like Blender? In other words: how do I get the VRay required for rendering the scripts output?

what do you see as an advantage of VRay over Vue, for rendering Poser scenes? Since Vue has a static as well as a dynamic interaction with Poser and can handle its material tree directly, and has quite a decent renderer, and has all the landscaping as an extra compared to VRay, and may come as a part of the price: what extra quality do I get for the extra bucks?

Basically: besides the sheer fun and learning curve from making the script as such, what is the user/commercial perspective of the exercise?

i dont have any experiene with Vue. but i am reading a lot how Vray is very popular with interior,exterior renders and skin. i found on google a lot skin renders. vray has a good skin SSS shader.

I agree Vue is the best supported  Option for rendering outside of poser
A plugin to export poser scene to Vray would be very Difficult to Do and not likely Done For No Cost so where is the $$Commercial$$ Market for this??
and BTW Vray Will not just apply Sub Surface scattering to your existing poser skin textures you will have to replace them entirely with mats built in Vray.

Cheers

Luxpose is not dead. I've tried explaining this already 10 times. I'm working on three contracts right now. One of these has been a single project going on for more than a year.

Luxpose is not the work of a few evenings. In order to complete the next step (material editing) I am building the entire Poser material room over again, from scratch. I have been working on it when I have time. I do not have a project plan, so I can't say when it will be revealed. But I have some stuff that didn't exist a month ago.

Just because you don't see daily (buggy) releases from me (as you did from somebody else) proves nothing about the lack of progress. I'll keep things to myself until they are ready for you to use, sans bugs, and with a UI that is intuitive and easy, instead of something that will result in 500 forum posts asking for help.

However, I am getting a bit tired of reading negative crapola about Luxpose - be careful or I'll decide to make the whole thing not-open. At the moment it would seem that I am the only one who works on it. And in the version I'm using, the only bit of code that didn't come from me is the geometry exporter, which odf wrote.

The Programmer for the DAZ/LUX plugin Worked for a Half  year Alone and he is now charging ($80) to recoup some of his invested time
If indeed you will now be the lone developer of a LUX/poser plugin You too, Should Consider making it a Commercial product.

its only Fair to you IMHO.

Cheers

Quote - Just asking:

...

what do you see as an advantage of VRay over Vue, for rendering Poser scenes? Since Vue has a static as well as a dynamic interaction with Poser and can handle its material tree directly, and has quite a decent renderer, and has all the landscaping as an extra compared to VRay, and may come as a part of the price: what extra quality do I get for the extra bucks?

Basically: besides the sheer fun and learning curve from making the script as such, what is the user/commercial perspective of the exercise?

Two aspects i personally find interesting:

1. It may be faster. I do not know if it is, but since there seem to be a lot of differences in rendering speed (variance between slow and very slow) for the different renderers, there probably is a lot of room for improvement.

2. It runs on linux. This by itself might not be a strong advantage, but since vue only runs on windows, you have to buy a windows-license for each vue-instance you run.

Quote - I agree Vue is the best supported  Option for rendering outside of poser
A plugin to export poser scene to Vray would be very Difficult to Do and not likely Done For No Cost so where is the $$Commercial$$ Market for this??
and BTW Vray Will not just apply Sub Surface scattering to your existing poser skin textures you will have to replace them entirely with mats built in Vray.

 

Cheers

i dont think you can open vray seperate. tis just a renderer. you need to have this in the 3d software. so for eample in maya,3dsmax or in poser if someone would od this.  

of course a plug in for Vray would not be free. that would be crazy. the guy who would do this would need to buy vray and need to spend months on this.

People who like to build up some experience with external renderers might take a look at POVray (www.povray.org, the oldest one on earth I guess (about 1990 and still improving)) and the PoseRay (http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/index.htm) converter. Its free. Its all there. It won't be perfect but it gives you a feel for the workflow. It handles Poser as well as Daz Studio, and like VRay, it can handle Blender as well as Sketchup. POVray does Windows, Mac and Linux. PoseRay does Windows, and Linux on Wine.

Just for fun: go to the LuxRender site, features (http://www.luxrender.net/v/features) and take a good look at the top image. Then go to the POVray site, Hall of Fame, at about 70% you'll find the McIntosh tube amplifier. Same thing. 

Now take the patio shot just two images down the tube amplifier. Now look at Callads LuxRender shot out of Daz Studio of Stonemasions recent creation: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2130205. 

So fill me in on your additional quality demands on top of POV. Look at the POVray architecture, nature and interior shots. Imagine your Poser work in there. Today. At no extra costs.

VRay is valuable. LuxRender is valuable. Inventors are valuable, and wheels are valuable too. Don't take me wrong. But don't make me take reinventing wheels for progress. If all those people who worked on those Lux-things had worked on improving the POV environment instead, we would have had one great thing instead of two good ones. Or three when the Poser/VRay bridge comes off too.

On the other hand, people get a choice then. If that's your goal, fine.

But whoever wants to trade the enhanced scanline renderer Firefly for a real raytracer, can do that right now.

Happy Posing

"i dont think you can open vray seperate. tis just a renderer. you need to have this in the 3d software. so for eample in maya,3dsmax or in poser if someone would do this."

OK I think perhaps you are confused then.
If you want Vray Rendering for your favorite app
Chaos Group , the owners of the Vray code,
has to create a port for your app you cant do it your self legally anyway so your entire Question is Moot
unless you are trying to convince Choas Group to do it
and they are NOT going to.

Notice how ALL of the Apps( Except Sketchup) with Vray Bridges are FULL CG Suites?
and even Sketchup has Modeling tools for Architectural Pros.

There are already Many Means to get a poser scene intact into a Vray Supported App Like C4D or MAX and render from there.

Cheers

There is a relatively new, open source renderer being developed , called Mitsuba. Some people over in the Blender community are quite excited about it and with good reason, The renderer is very powerful even in it's early stages, plus the developer is talented and open to input.

Personally, I think Smith Micro should get in contact with this young man before the big guys snap him up.

Mitsuba

take care

Quote - People who like to build up some experience with external renderers might take a look at POVray (www.povray.org, the oldest one on earth I guess (about 1990 and still improving)) and the PoseRay (http://mysite.verizon.net/sfg0000/index.htm) converter. Its free. Its all there. It won't be perfect but it gives you a feel for the workflow. It handles Poser as well as Daz Studio, and like VRay, it can handle Blender as well as Sketchup. POVray does Windows, Mac and Linux. PoseRay does Windows, and Linux on Wine.

Just for fun: go to the LuxRender site, features (http://www.luxrender.net/v/features) and take a good look at the top image. Then go to the POVray site, Hall of Fame, at about 70% you'll find the McIntosh tube amplifier. Same thing. 

Now take the patio shot just two images down the tube amplifier. Now look at Callads LuxRender shot out of Daz Studio of Stonemasions recent creation: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2130205. 

So fill me in on your additional quality demands on top of POV. Look at the POVray architecture, nature and interior shots. Imagine your Poser work in there. Today. At no extra costs.

VRay is valuable. LuxRender is valuable. Inventors are valuable, and wheels are valuable too. Don't take me wrong. But don't make me take reinventing wheels for progress. If all those people who worked on those Lux-things had worked on improving the POV environment instead, we would have had one great thing instead of two good ones. Or three when the Poser/VRay bridge comes off too.

On the other hand, people get a choice then. If that's your goal, fine.

But whoever wants to trade the enhanced scanline renderer Firefly for a real raytracer, can do that right now.

Happy Posing

I used for some years POV-Ray. Develpment wise, it is a tremendously closed community (probably you have more chances to enter some Illuminati-like secrets societies than entering POV developers group) and so people used to create forks like MegaPOV. In addition, POV code license is totally anti-open source (though they say that v4 will be released under the GPL). Add to these issues the fact that POV is nearly immobile (3.7 beta phase started in... spring 2005, 5 YEARS ago) and then you see that there is ample scope for other tools.

In addition to "human" issues, remember that POV is a old (based upon DKBTrace, 1986) raytracer with some radiosity (still tagged "experimental", LOL) while Lux is a moder unbiased renderer with state of art algorithms.

All added, I would not even note POV as an alternative in late 2010, just as a fond and great memory (my first reflective sphere on a checkered floor..).

Anyway, do not expect one-click conversions from Poser to any external renderers: to do their magick, they need you to hand tune materials for their internal engines so roll up your sleeves and get under the hood if you go that way, especially for complex stuff like skin, which requires sophisticated rendering techniques if you go for detailed shots.

poray looks fake as hell. there was not a single render on their site that looks 50% realistic. a decent render since its free but not better then poser rendering.

Quote -  

 

"i dont think you can open vray seperate. tis just a renderer. you need to have this in the 3d software. so for eample in maya,3dsmax or in poser if someone would do this."

 

OK I think perhaps you are confused then.
If you want Vray Rendering for your favorite app
Chaos Group , the owners of the Vray code,
has to create a port for your app you cant do it your self legally anyway so your entire Question is Moot
unless you are trying to convince Choas Group to do it
and they are NOT going to.

Notice how ALL of the Apps( Except Sketchup) with Vray Bridges are FULL CG Suites?
and even Sketchup has Modeling tools for Architectural Pros.

There are already Many Means to get a poser scene intact into a Vray Supported App Like C4D or MAX and render from there.

Cheers

didnt you see that i talked about a vray plug in for Poser.?  you dont need a 3D app for using Vray. vray is a renderer. it needs mesh,textures,UV's . and voila.  

I see you mean  THIS VERSION

Not a bad price.

Now you need to convince someone to get the SDK an learn how to convert
poser scenes to "vrscnene " format 
without using Python
have at it

Cheers

349? i saw a site that has it for 249 euro.

the real cost will be to pay your programmer to write the plugin

for a render engine that cost more than poser

your money might be better spent on some flavor of vue.

Cheers

So there is a VRay standalone after all (I couldn't find it on ChaosGroup). Might be a nice sidekick to PP2010. It will bring its own cameras, lighting, advanced material settings and will require all textures to be gamma corrected beforehand!

@alexcoppo

Thanks for the remarks, appreciated.

POV is old, but Microsoft Word is older, so what? Like typing and storytelling, Raytracing hasn't changed that much. The software changed to add functional enhancements, to meet technological changes and to gain speed. Also POV knows his way around multi-core 64-bit CPU's and around gamma correcting input files (change log, sept 2009) while it was even in for PNG in version 3.6, that is: before 2005! Note that SM (and others) did not sell / advocate this as a major feature until PP2010. 

Naming a tool 3.7.39 (POV) or 0.7.1 (LuxRender) or P8SR3 (Poser) or Build 52326 (Vue) doesn't say much to me. Terragen 2 was in beta for three years, and Terragen Classic is just a renaming of TG 0.9.43 as stabilized in 2005.

So let's refer to the current tool at hand, and save history for the historians.

Given (un)proper settings, VRay can be as artifical as POV, but I don't really see much differences between the LuxRander and the POV results I mentioned in my earlier post. I bet there are though, but they are far less than between FireFly and POV in the first place. So from an end user point of view, using POV right now is a major step compared to waiting for LuxRender or VRay in the future. One can get accustomed to the workflow, and one can always make the change later. That's my point, for end-users. Don't wait, start now and learn.

For developers, POV is not under GPL yet and it's not open source either, and the developers group can make a closed impression. Understandable given history (start far before GPL/Open Source were dreamed of, vast amounts of buggy modules in the late nineties, etc) and I agree that it has to change. They should have done that earlier, but did we really ask them? And I do understand why people start creating their own renderers, it is fun and a great learning experience, and if all goes well end-users are offered a choice which is good. But in the end reinventing wheels is good for inventors only. Blender names external 9 renderers to interface with. Let's not do that to Poser.

On the other hand, VRay is not open source either and the development team is as closed as the POV team (see Wolf359 above: unless you are trying to convince Choas Group to do it and they are NOT going to.) Well, the POV team seems to respond to change requests properly at least, given their change log. So why should not being Open Source be a disadvantage to POV only? Its against VRay too.

For end users, better results for lower prices are the only things that matter.

best regards.

Hi IMHO there Likely Wont be a Commercial plugin to convert poser scenes to "vrscene" files
just based on a few peoples desire to have real SSS for poser renders.
The Demand is just too small.

Cheers

wolf359:
How is VRay for character animation; is it a practical solution?
I bought it for Cinema 4D a few years back when my company was doing a lot of architectural/engineering work. We transitioned over to character animation before I could really dive into VRay; it's been collecting dust on my hard drive ever since.
I think I still qualify for the upgrade; I just need to know if it's worth it for us.
JT

Hi  THIS is rendered in Vray

(NOT my work of course)

Cheers

Just to note that PoseRay also exports Poser scenes to Kerkythea, a very capable renderer with both biased and unbiased modes. Other than Vue though AFAI, none of these support Poser's material definitions. Daz Studio has a plugin that is supposed to unlock all the features of 3Delight or enable you to use Pixar's Renderman if you really want to run with the big dogs. I'm not sure what kind of material support it provides though.

The question, as you said, is how many Poser users would spring for a -  probably - even more complex render engine, plus any cost for the plugin. And, who among the handful of people with the required expertise would be willing to tackle it for love or - again probably -  a limited amount of money. The odds I think, are not in favor of such an enterprise, though anything is possible.

I think it is rather a solution in search of a problem. There probably won't be a metnal ray or finalRender plugin either, but there are plenty of free to expensive options and I'm not sure that VRay has any special magic. the some of the others don't. Try Vue while you're looking. I believe SkinVue is included with the new versions and that give's you SSS for Poser figures probably easier than anything else.

I agree poser users need to stop looking for some Holy grail rendering solution and embrace what is already viable for poser ..like vue

BTW KERKYTHEA  is no longer being developed but has basicly been rebranded as "Thea" another  unbiased Render Engine.
I tested its demo a while back .. not bad IIRC
but I am more than well equipped with C4D/Vray/Maxwell and MODO401's render engine

Cheers

"BTW KERKYTHEA  is no longer being developed"

not so. according to their website. Kerky's "still being developed but will be slowed down while we concentrate on Thea" - so there should be development in the future. until the dev team says otherwise, I'd believe 'em.

Quote - Daz Studio has a plugin that is supposed to unlock all the features of 3Delight or enable you to use Pixar's Renderman if you really want to run with the big dogs. I'm not sure what kind of material support it provides though.

With a Renderman compliant renderer (like the tongue twister?), you can create any kind of shaders: you code the computations in a C-like language, compile the shader and off you go. You can make things as easy as a matte solid color or as complex as you can dream; also, you could not imagine a technology farther from the "make art button" than this.

If you want to try it, get Aqsis.

"...you can create any kind of shaders..."

This is true but without some level of support for native shaders, (which the DS plugin apparently has) I'm not sure what the advantage of a plugin would be over simple .obj export. To have the kind of mass appeal that would make a plugin worthwhile, you need either pretty darn good shader translation or a drastically easier GUI shader construction paradigm than C or node networks IMO. In addition to the traditional three dicta of 3D rendering, fast, cheap good, I think easy is a worthy addition for the growing hobbyist community. There is a limit to how easy you can get (and easy includes material translation/creation as well as render settings), but I think that the limits have not yet been approached.

In my limited experience, Vue comes closest to hitting all four of the sweet spots, though by design, it is optimized for outdoor scenes - and of course if you like, the Flying Spaghetti Monster lurks within the advanced options in all of his noodly goodness :-)

..Speaking of Vray & poser

MY LATEST

Cheers

Truespace used to have V-Ray for Truespace but it went away because of low sales. But some Truespace users are working on getting Truespace to work with the V-Ray Standalone and they are making progress.

http://www.united3dartists.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1393&start=60

Truespace is still available for free at http://caligari.com/ along with tutes. Truespace works with Poser.

There's also this possible option if you don't have PoserPro 2010 and you are willing to use DAZ Studio. Export from DS using collada to Blender 2.5, reorient the scene (IIRC it comes in flipped over) and when Yafaray 0.1.2 is working well (and I hear this beta combo works at present, unless they broke something on either end) use Yafaray to render...the poor man's open source V-Ray.

"There's also this possible option if you don't have PoserPro 2010 and you are willing to use DAZ Studio. ...."

If users here were willing to use daz studio they could be rendering in Lux
for $40 USD up until midnight to day  as the "Reality" plugin is 50% Off.

Daz studio basic free
Lux render free.

but people want to go directly from poser to other render engines directly I suppose.

Cheers

I have Reality. Didn't know it was on sale again, which is good to know for those who haven't jumped on board. But speed is an issue that's been brought up and LuxRender isn't fast yet. Reality does save you time in setting things up, though, as you get fairly fast feedback on how lighting will work, etc.

There's also Stefan's old PoserMan script  to export Poser rib files to 3Delight that could be modified and improved upon and for use with other Render Man engines. Seems to me he mentioned that not too long ago here.

http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/poserman.html

One very nice open source alternative would be yafaray. Faster than an unbiased render engine, and if you check the gallery, not bad at all :)

But still who is going to code a DIRECT poser exporter plugin to Yafray??

Most of the users here dont want to have to go thru another app
( DS,Blender etc)

to get their scenes into these other render engines.

it is a shame to be so wedded to posers 1990's Kai Kruase interface

that some are left begging others to create means to let them stay there ( in the 1990's) at all costs.

Cheers

I agree wolf359, chances that someone would undertake such a thing are very small (at least for free).

What I meant is, they are more chances we would see a bridge comparable to Reality or luxrender to an open source tool like yafaray than to a still fairly expansive render engine like vray.

Outside of Blender, they are actually not so many affordable solutions with a great render engine.

• vue render engine is good for landscapes (that's what it was designed for) but not so good when you start to make a decent interior render you have to cranck up the settings so much that it gets very slow (I have a dual Xeon X5680 which is a fairly okay computer)

• carrara has a good render engine and would even actually be better for interior renders than vue (+ of course great support for poser characters and nice dynamic hair)

after that you jump to programs like modo (beautiful render engine), lightwave (also a great render engine) and C4D (but you need the advanced renderer / vray to have something comparable to the previously named). All those babies are fairly expansive for a hobbyist (I won't even mention maya, max, xsi ...)

I am lucky enough to have access to mental ray, and for sure, I would LOVE to be ableto afford something similar at home (a lot of debate about this, but roughly, mental ray and vray are very similar in quality, speed and complexity).

To be honest, if I could get mental ray (or vray for that matter "plugged" in daz studio or carrarra or Poser, I would probably be ready to shell out $1000 (plug-in AND render engine)

Attached Link: http://www.stewreo.de/poser/scripts/poser2yafray.py

Me, seven years ago. See the link. Didn't to much with it and it probably doesn't even work any more with the current version of Yafaray. But there's nothing stopping anyone from writing such an exporter, it's not very hard.

That's a great start! Thanks for posting the link!! I didn't know you wrote that, too.

Quote - There's also this possible option if you don't have PoserPro 2010 and you are willing to use DAZ Studio. Export from DS using collada to Blender 2.5, reorient the scene (IIRC it comes in flipped over) and when Yafaray 0.1.2 is working well (and I hear this beta combo works at present, unless they broke something on either end) use Yafaray to render...the poor man's open source V-Ray.

If you go thru Blender, Lux has a very good integration support for it so you can select either Yafaray or Lux.

For any coders looking to work on what Stefan (Stewer) started 7 years ago, you may want to check out what TrueSpace users did...

http://www.yafaray4ts.org/

Quote - I wrote:

Quote - There's also this possible option if you don't have PoserPro 2010 and you are willing to use DAZ Studio. Export from DS using collada to Blender 2.5, reorient the scene (IIRC it comes in flipped over) and when Yafaray 0.1.2 is working well (and I hear this beta combo works at present, unless they broke something on either end) use Yafaray to render...the poor man's open source V-Ray.

alexcoppo wrote: If you go thru Blender, Lux has a very good integration support for it so you can select either Yafaray or Lux.

Good idea, too.

I don’t agree with the notion that the vintage or parentage of Poser’s interface is relevant. The same issue would exist if people were using a 2010 interface designed by whoever. IMO issue is wanting to have all the functionality accessible from within that interface. There’s nothing remotely odd about that. Who would want to save a document and then have to run a separate spellchecker application on it – though at one time that was done?

Whether the desire for such integration is realistic is an entirely different matter. I suspect there is also a degree of unrealistic expectation about achieving magical results simply be hooking Poser up to another render engine without a non-trivial amount of work on the part of the user and/or the plug-in developer. Perhaps this desire is to some extent fueled by the rise of the neo-realist school of Poser art. I may well be missing something but I have yet to see anything near revolutionary from that quarter when it comes to rendering Poser figures (as opposed to non-organic objects) when compared to a good native Poser render.

If you want anything beyond an incremental improvement, then the amount of work required to get content into an external renderer is small compared to the amount of work you will likely have to do to use that engine to its fullest. Think of it in terms of using Google to translate Japanese into English. The bare essence may be there but, but only human intervention is going to yield a good result.

"IMO issue is wanting to have all the functionality accessible from within that interface. There’s nothing remotely odd about that."

No it is not But such intergration does not seem feasable or at least Desirable for a Volunteer, which might explain why Baggins bill is (presumably)
building a separate UI using adobe Air.

"Whether the desire for such integration is realistic is an entirely different matter. I suspect there is also a degree of unrealistic expectation about achieving magical results simply be hooking Poser up to another render engine without a non-trivial amount of work on the part of the user and/or the plug-in developer. Perhaps this desire is to some extent fueled by the rise of the neo-realist school of Poser art. I may well be missing something but I have yet to see anything near revolutionary from that quarter when it comes to rendering Poser figures (as opposed to non-organic objects) when compared to a good native Poser render."

And frankly sir you Will NOT see anything revolutionary as long as people are using the DAZ M/V clones or the Smith micro Digital corpses IMHO..sorry
And  trust me I have personally rendered them in Vray, Maxwell ,C4D AR3, Modo 301, and Kray for Lightwave and in the end they stand out like two sore thumbs( SSS or Not) when compared to a high quality Stonemason Sci fi set or similar. perhaps it just good old fashion 'Uncanny Valley".

And from reading LUXPose thread it seems that Many Desired to have all of their poser lighting untouched but somehow still looking "more realistic" in LUX
The truth about all of these so Called "physically correct" engines is that they are based entirely on tradition real world photographic principles
and those Arc/Vis, Product Shot artist in those"high end" galleries have built their  Models based on real world "physical specs.

The same cannot be said for the current crop of poser figures

Cheers

Quote - * *And frankly sir you Will NOT see anything revolutionary as long as people are using the DAZ M/V clones or the Smith micro Digital corpses IMHO..sorry
And  trust me I have personally rendered them in Vray, Maxwell ,C4D AR3, Modo 301, and Kray for Lightwave and in the end they stand out like two sore thumbs( SSS or Not) when compared to a high quality Stonemason Sci fi set or similar. perhaps it just good old fashion 'Uncanny Valley".

Actually, those characters are far to be bad (the weakest point being of course the rigging). Victoria definitively need some rescaling of her legs to be "realistic" but aside from that, they are enough morphs to make them look good. They only need: a good NATURAL looking pose, an EXPRESSION on their face (too many renders where only the body is posed and, very important, materials carefully crafted to match the need of the render engine (you won't have any success using the mental ray skin shader with a poser texture set out of the box, however good this texture set might be, because it's not what the shader expect).

So yes, I agree, you can't hope to have wonderfull scenes just lby loading poser characters in a different render engine and pressing a button, no way. The mesh themselves are fine, but materials (it often implies creating texture maps that are not used in Poser or DS) and lights will always need to be adapted (sometimes quiet heavily). It's not a weakness of Poser or DS to be honest, it's always so: in max if you were to simply switch from scanline to mental ray without changing anything else, not much "great" would happen.

This is definitely the most interesting discussion I've seen in a long time!
I think what everybody in the Poser world needs to realize is that eventually you'll have to roll up your sleeves and learn how to light and render your scenes. The problem of course is that even the most basic industry-standard lighting approaches are so mind-numbingly difficult to pull off in Poser that most users start looking for better programs that still allow DAZ and Poser content to be used.
VRay is great and all, but outside of architectural work, it's best suited for larger outfits with the necessary talent and more importantly the right hardware to truly use it to it's full potential. One person with one computer and a copy of Poser isn't gonna be able to do much outside of the occasional gallery upload.
Which brings me to Lux...
I hate to say it, but the whole "LuxPose" project is a colossal waste of time. Lux still requires a solid know-how of lighting and rendering techniques and its render times are so laughably slow that I can't imagine a single scenario where Lux would be a viable solution. Even for architecture, something like Mental Ray, which ain't exactly known for its speed, would be a vastly better option-despite the price tag.
We're definitely in a strange place these days; I'm seeing more and more professionals using Poser and DAZ models, but at the same time Poser has fallen so far behind the curve that modern gaming engines are producing better results in less time.
Still, I think the vast majority of Poser users are content with their program. It's simple to use, you can buy everything you need, and it's dirt-cheap. Poser easily meets the needs of hobbyists who are looking for something to scratch their collective creative itch and that's perfectly fine.
On the other hand; Poser always seems to get a select few of its users thinking about a potential career in CG, which is a beautiful thing...but you can't do it with Poser :)