Octane -is- a viable option as an external render, particularly if you don't want to add other programs like Vue or Lightwave to your workflow. I haven't had a chance to test it out (yet. Vacation next week, though...... :D ). The downside to Octane is that it forces you to learn optimizing; you are limited to the texture slots that the GPU is built with, so you have to be real careful about what you load and how many textures, bumpmaps, transmaps, normal maps (basically anything that looks like a texture takes as texture slot). And you have to use a specific family of  NVIDIA GPUs, as Octane is built to exploit the Cuda architecture. But that downside is actually a good thing. Optimizing is one of the sorely needed skills in the Poser-verse. Poser can handle gobs of huge textures, but not a lot of other apps can handle the translation

If you get a 600 series NVidia card (the 650's are around $150) you can load a total of 232 different textures.  Only very large Poser scenes are going to exceed that.

The plugin run INSIDE Poser, so no need to export scenes.  Just animate and render all in the one app.

The DEMO version of the OctaneRender for Poser plugin will not let you save, so you can't render animations with it.  Stills are fine though.

Octane is a unbiased rendered, so going to give a more realistic result that Vue (and all the other renders mentioned).  Worth keeping in mind if you are going to stitch the results together.

Paul

Creator of PoserPhysics
Creator of OctaneRender for Poser
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