I've been browsing through some artwork, and i noticed that some renders look nearly like photos or very realistic. They mention that they use luxrender and reality for daz studio. From what i can tell, reality 3 for poser won't be released till november, and a lot of people say luxrender gives them lots of crashes, which i would definitely like to avoid.

Is there an alternative way in poser pro 2012 to make realistic looking images without having to use a different render engine? Maybe indirect lighting or some other method?

It's all in the material settings and lighting. Look for...pretty much anything posted by Bagginsbill.

Its not like point and click.  I recommend bagginsBill's P8 Soft Studio lighting sample scene...drop in V4 and render.  Then start analyzing it all.  You'll be amazed at how nice it is out of the box.  If you have a good skin texture, hit it with EZSkin before render as well.

It's as close to a "Make Art" button as you will get.  Then read, render, read, render, and repeat many, many times.

Poser, DS, Carrara, Lux, Blender, Octane, etc...in the hands of a master, they all can produce really "real" results.  :)

Quote -  and a lot of people say luxrender gives them lots of crashes, which i would definitely like to avoid.

Pick any piece of 3D software and there will be a group of people who experience some crashes, for a lot of rasons, not always related to the software. Lux is very stable. The main reason for some crashes is to render images that are beyond the installaed amount of RAM in the machine. 

Physics-based rendering poses more demands on your machine.

Cheers 

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?

Fastidious attention to detail, it all starts with the maps or shaders. Spend time looking at work done by professionals at ZBrush or CGsociety to name a couple. Properly scaled textures are a must, I see people putting up renders all the time with clothing or wood textures that are not properly sized for the object they are placed on. Or wood grain textures running the wrong way. Its usually not just one element that makes it pop realistic

but a texture/shader that works with the lighting. You can get very good renders with basic light setups if you use material setups that work with them. Experiment, start with just 1 light with all the rest turned off. Try no lights with just an emmitter (a prop ball scaled to about 800%, white, with ambient set to about 5 can give good results, then duplicate and try several prop balls placed in diff positions) Just my opinion but I see a lot of vendors putting up product with what appears to be minimal work on textures, relying on some of the new free shader and lighting setups to make up for a lack of work on textures. Imagine if "artist" would use these products to inhance their work rather than use them as a shortcut. Getting something to look professional just flat out takes a lot of work. Read and study books or articles on photography, lighting, etc.

Thanks for the tips. I'll take the bagginbill's route for now and experiment a bit with that. This is his site right?

http://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/free-stuff

Where do i get EZSkin2 from?

http://snarlygribbly.org/3d/forum/

Not much I can think of to add that hasn't already been stated above.

There are a lot of variables when it comes to trying to achieve 'realism' no matter what render engine you use.  It's not just one thing or the other.  A great material can look like absolute crap if the lighting is bad, and vice versa.  Even when you get that right you have to have a natual looking pose if using figures.  It goes on and on.  

In my opinion though, it really comes down to patience.  A great image can take hours of rendering, tweeking, rerendering, tweeking, etc.  Add in that sometimes your 'test' renders might need to have higher render settings, and you are looking at a good chunk of time.

There are a lot of tools and information out there on these forums and RDNA that you can learn from.  Just don't try and do it all at once when learning.  Learn a new technique, apply it, improve it, THEN move on to another technique.  It's all really about TRYING to get better and then noticing when you DO get better.

One other thing, is the little details.  Our eyes notice when these things aren't there or are done wrong.  Things like shadows, accessories, DoF, reflections, etc.

I'm getting nearer to what I want now that Poser has been upgraded.

Better lighting has always been what everyone wanted, and now we have it.

You should have tried it back in P4 days LOL.

This one renered quite well in Poser itself - nowhere near perfect but I like the lighting.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/media/folder_229/file_2285333.jpg

Yeah i noticed that lighting has a LOT to do with realism, and definitely makes the difference between a good render and bad render. I tried out a few indirect lighting sets, which were designed with a backdrop for solo characters, and it rendered really clear, like a photograph. The problem though, is that the sets are designed for studio/solo poses, and have about an average of 15 lights. Besides baggin's free set, are there other indirect lighting sets or techniques to achieve that realism, but with more versatility? Also, i noticed that diffuse IBL with HDR images tend to produce pretty good quality images. So much things to test my head is about to explode ><

From BB's page, go and get the Environment sphere. Enclosing your scene will give IDL rays something to bounce off of. Sure you can render without an environment sphere, but it will take much longer. At least in my experience it has taken longer when I forgot to load the sphere. I don't reccomend using the sphere 'naked'. Follow one of the links on BB's page for some good free images for your sphere. Images from philohome work well. Some will say to use a HDR image on the sphere. One of BB's favorites is dodger2 (you can find that from the links on his page). I prefer not to use HDR. Also look around his site for the Brightness meter. This is a very handy prop because it will visually tell you if your lights are too blown out. It load roughtly next to the Head of a V4 sized figure. When you're satisfied with your light level using this prop, it can then be moved out of camera range for your final render.

I have yet to have the patience to read and learn from bagginsbill's posts.  Until I do, I am relying on LuxRender to do the hard work of achieving realism for me.  With the time I spend rendering, tweaking shaders/lights/settings, rerendering with Poser firefly and yet not get any half-way decent results, I could have set up a Poser scene, send it to LuxRender via Pose2Lux and gotten a good photorealistic image from LuxRender with hardly any effort.  I just go do something else while it renders.