Quote - I saw todays RNDA newsletter advertising Reality 3, the nice images caught my eye, and the page says its for luxrender. Yet on the luxrender site it links to pose2lux and thats free. I've heard of luxrender and reality for daz studio, and the impression was this studio only, so whats the difference twixt Reality for poser and pose2lux?

 

Well since you already mentioned the free thing...

For those who are on older versions of Poser pose2lux is compatible back to Poser 6, so for those of us who for a variety of reasons have not yet upgraded Poser we aren't being left out in the cold. 

As I have no real knowledge of the  workings of Reality,  I can only say that with a little basic reading up there is little in the way of materials that can't be added into p2l with some .xml files, Snarly kindly provided a guide for writing them when he was creating p2l.  Which can be found on the exporters official site, in the forums I believe.  From there it is simply learning what each material type does in Lux and coding accordingly.  And with Lux's documentation readily available on the site, even I picked it up in a week or so.  Basically you need to learn to use Lux, not a bad thing if you want to take what it can do to its limits. 

I think the most fundamental difference for the typical user is that Reality seems to have a far prettier interface and you don't need to edit files and bring them in.  For some a selling point I am sure, for me, I like the fun of hacking together my own materials and seeing what they do.  

A lack of documentation might be part of my desire to stick with p2l, I like to know exactly what I am buying ahead of time and a handful of videos and some (admittedly) pretty pictures won't sell me on thawing my credit card I like things like detailed features lists, a full walkthrough tutorial, something that says this can do something what I am already using can't...  Right now, I don't see it.

My two cents... And hopefully answers some of the questions, I am sure Snarlygribbly or LaurieA would be able to answer far more fully than I can, I got distracted by the shiny things in the materials and haven't resurfaced from that in about 2 years.