Quote - I was going to mention IES, which is the only place I know where the concept of something like a 60 watt bulb is relevant. I think that Carrara 8 supports IES lights. The only thing I have that does is Kerkythea and I've never messed with them. In ref to what Ockham said, I know that some manufacturers of things like textiles, paint or carpet provide bitmaps of their product textures. I don't know if  it would possible/desirable to have materials based on actual realworld surfaces, though obviously they'd be unique to a particular render engine - and for arch/viz that would probably be VRay, SketchUp etc.

Well, not sure if it's possible, but certainly it's desireable to have the ability to reproduce realworld surfaces in Poser through native rendering.  I know it is possible to some degree, because Firefly allows you to specify IOR value for relfective/refractive surfaces, and has fresnel falloff for material parameters, which are realworld attributes.  So the same should apply for lighting.  Anything useful in Arch/Viz is as much useful in organic/Poser rendering too, if the end goal is realism.

Not to get off track, but I've used Vray for many years, and I produce mostly human-oriented/organic-centric renders.  At least that's my goal.  Now I'm using Luxrender on a network, simply because i feel the unbiased lighting is pretty much dummy-proof, and although the rendertimes have gone up substantially over Vray, the cost is offset by a much quicker prep time with regards to scene preparation and, specifically, lighting.  With Lux, for example, realistic reflective caustics just "happen", they aren't something you need to prepare the renderer for, or adjust parameters to achieve.  Same thing with realistic light bounce throughout the scene.  I can put a white panel in the scene, for example, and it will reflect light onto objects in the scene, as it should, exactly as I would expect it to in the real world, without making complex adjustments in the renderer for photon emission, or what have you.  It just works.

So something like IES profiles could only enhance our ability to achieve believable results without complex, or time consuming, workarounds.  What makes arch/viz renders look real, should, and do, make organic renders look real.  Etc. etc.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.