So, the announcement is out and I have a technology preview that shows how Reality works:

http://preta3d.com/technology-preview-reality-3-for-poser/

Quote - Questions about Reality 3 (I can wait until the 7th for answers to these):

Does it have a setting to make single-sided materials double-sided (such as glass, or, say...a dragon's wing membrane?) automatically?

This is an old idea that I wanted to implement for Reality 2. I hope to be able to do it for version 3. If not, it will be implemented in a subsequent update. There are too many models out there that use single polygon glass or wall to avoid this issue or hope for more accurate models in the future. 

Quote - Stained glass setting using a Kd map for Kd and transmission color?

Sure.

Quote - Skin materials for more than the normal range of skin colors? (Say I want to render a blue-skinned chick or a green-skinned alien. Are there material presets that work well with these colors? As I understand it, human skin is predominantly red in its scattering, and that poses problems in Poser Pro 2012 for alternate skin colors)

Reality 3 will include a Skin material, I'll keep your suggestions in mind. There is no issue in setting the SSS with a color that is more suited for non-human skin.

Quote - Idiot-friendly transmission color settings for liquids or colored glasses?

  Count on it. It's already part of Reality 2, Reality 3 UI is much better.

Quote - Presets for a hefty bunch of gemstones? Metals?

There will be all kind of IOR settings for gemstones, glasses, fluids etc. To that you will have to add your color of choice. Metals have the common presets plus you can plug in your color and/or texture to create your own custom metals. For example, youc an have green anodized aluminum. It's really piece of cake with Reality.

Quote - Will it process and convert materials that use the Scatter materials from the material room? What blender nodes driven by grayscale images? What about blender nodes, period?

Yes, yes and yes :)

That was the whole point in making this program. Poser artists must be able to use any existing shader and get some reasonable conversion automatically. That is what Reality does. Then you have the Reality Material Editor to further refine the material and take advantage of Lux's unique materials and properties.

Reality 3 for Poser scans the whole shader tree of all materials involved and tries to convert as much as possible automatically. 

Hope this helps. 

Paolo

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