Quote - I have the OpenCL version of Luxrender installed and set it to use OpenCL in R3.  According to the stats during a render I have 8 threads on the CPU and one on the GPU.  I assume this means that it is working with OpenCL but I am not sure and don't know how to check.  Also not sure what impact it will have but I am just at the bottom looking up at this steep learning curve at the moment, but having fun.

If Lux is showing 1 GPU in the render stats, that does mean that it is using OpenCL. I've experimented with GPU assisted renders, and easily get 2-3 times greater samples per second rates than with straight CPU. But what I've found so far is that the GPU assisted renders take a lot more time to clear up the fire flies, but I could be doing something wrong.

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On a different but related subject, I have always found lighting in Poser very difficult, while lighting in Carrara, DS, and Lux is easy for me. For those who struggle with Poser lights like I do, Reality 3 may make using Poser much "easier". Typically my final renders take quite while (hours), so using Lux isn't as big of an issue for me as anyone who want's/needs to have the render done in 10 minutes to an hour tops.

Lux also provides something that Poser doesn't .... caustics. For anyone who has dreamed of rendering their scenes with caustics for more realistic lighting effects on glass, fliuds, jewels, etc., Reality 3 makes this fairly easy now, and at a very reasonable price compared to some of the other options.

Laurie is pretty accurate about throwing out what you've learned for Poser when it comes to lighting and shaders with Reality/Lux. But this is basically true with any new/different 3D application/renderer. Just like with Poser (or just about any 3D application), those who are willing to put the effort in to learning it will get great results. Lux is slow, but there are people who are able to optimize their scenes and get great results with decent render speeds of 1-5 hours.

My 3D app of choice is Carrara. So tweaking mats/shaders and setting up my own lights to render "Poser" content is part of the work flow. I started using Carrara to render Poser content with Poser 4 and Carrara 3, so I'm really used to this being a part of my work flow. I also like learning new things, so for me learning to optimise Poser mats/shaders for Lux isn't a big deal - But .... your milage could vary.

I posted an image this morning in my gallery here (link in my sig line) titled "A Simple Test" that was done with **no **modifications to the mats/shaders. It's not a great render, and could easily be made much better with a little extra effort. It was just a quick test to see how well Poser SSS mats would transfer from Poser to Lux via Reality 3. I was very pleased with how well Reality handles the conversion of the mats from Poser to Lux. The render ran for 7 hours, but I'm pretty sure that I could have stoped it in around 2-3 hours - I just let it run while I slept.

From my experience with poser mats in Carrara, and what has been posted in the threads here so far, I can gaurentee that not all mats/shaders will convert so effortlessly. So anyone who is on the fence about purchasing Reality 3, keep this in mind. Shader conversion is really a crap shoot. Sometimes it works so well that the converted shaders look better than they did in the native app, sometimes they just don't work at all.

As with any purchase in the Poserverse, how happy you will/would be with Reality 3 (and LuxRender) really depends on what you want, and how you want to do it. Just like Reality 2, Reality 3 is a top notch program, does an excellent job of translating the data from Poser to Lux, has a very detailed manual, and an interface that makes editing and setting things up for Lux fairly easy. Paolo (Pret-a-3d) also seems to truley care about the quality of his products, and customer satisfaction.

IMVHO, if you want to use an unbiased render engine with Poser9/PP2012, and don't want to invest $250+ to get there, right now, Reality 3 is your best option.

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