Quote - If you prefer un-realism, then Poser 5 is more than anybody needs and we would not need to discuss purchase decisions at all.

This is a really interesting thread and helped swing my decision to side-grade to pro with the extra 50% off at CP - $99 didn't seem too bad a deal to me.

However, as one of those who has had little interest in photorealism in the past, I would like to correct BB on this statement. The chief way of getting non-photorealistic results is through the use of filters/styles such as those in Postworkshop or the old Painter plug-in that I used to use. While these offer some control over the result (and that can be a lot of control when you have the node based style creation in PSW or FF) they are still limited by the initial image and their output is particularly dependent upon the lighting.

This is where 3D users have some advantage over photographers with filters, in that we have greater control over all the variables that produce the final image. Being able to set up lighting to best suit the filter you want to use is a major boon, so any new lighting trick that your software can offer is worth having. A good example is in sketch effects I was using a while back - I was getting much better results using IDL than any other lighting set ups. I dare say that if I spent a little longer setting up other lights I might be able to get results close to it but IDL is much quicker to set up (so far, I've not yet needed anything too sophisticated for the sketches) and then leave to render, so why bother? (It is slower to render but there are always other things to do in the mean time.)

Another anticipated boon will be the 64bit rendering. If you want to over-paint images in Painter or Art Rage, then a bigger canvas makes a whole lot of difference (at least to a ham fisted painter like me!). I hope this will do a better job of bigger renders.

Having said that, you've all awoken an interest in playing with some realism - if only for fun. I did try a couple of test renders with different textures and MAT set ups and wow, what a difference a simple set up makes with GC against the DAZ ones! However, those baked in highlights in many textures look awful with it. I'm going to have to have a good look through all the old stuff in my runtime to find the right texture sets and then work on simplifying the MATs for them. I have a feeling that Semidieu's new script might make short work of the later.