Indeed, you'll get crashes with anything potentially if you exceed the capability of your hardware... and that's easy to do with trying to render realism in 3d!

Relative to rendering in Firefly, I'd just echo the advice to get Bagginsbill's freebies and work through reading just about anything he's posted here and at runtimedna.com, to start with.

EZSkin2, which is a sophisticated macro script, written by Snarlygribbly, to easily apply the skin realism techniques developed by BB and others, to your character skin textures, is also a big help, I've certainly found!

Using BB's products, freebies and the stuff from his store here, which has folders full of ready-made materials in them, is certainly the route I've taken to bolster the quality of renders I can get out of Poser's built in Firefly renderer.

There's plenty there to keep you going till November I reckon

The introduction of an easy, accessible choice between Firefly (faster, biased renderer - i.e. more "heuristics" needed to achieve realism) and LuxRender via Reality3 (unbiased, physics modelled renderer) is exciting indeed!

I think it will be interesting to see how the balance tips once Reality is released... and as LuxRender is developed further.

Obviously Firefly has the speed advantage at present, for one thing. But going for more extreme realism in Firefly can take that advantage away.

Not everyone, myself included, is after realism, or hyper-realism, in all situations of course.

From what I've been reading, LuxRender, as I understand it, also has biased options... it will be interesting to know if and how these are implemented in Reality, I suspect?