Pose2Lux came out for Poser8/PP210 and was the first exporter for Poser to Luxrender, written by Snarlygribbly. It also can be used in Poser versions back to and including Poser 6. Reality works with Poser9/PP2012 only.

For Reality or for Pose2Lux you will need Luxrender because the two former softwares don't do any rendering - they only translate your Poser scene into something that Luxrender can understand, where then Luxrender takes over and does the actual rendering.

You need to learn a little bit more about Luxrender to be successful with Pose2Lux than you do for Reality. You can write your own Luxrender shaders and use them in Pose2Lux. Its free but not quite as easy, or as pretty as Reality. It does, however, get the same job done ;). Reality is more click and render than Pose2Lux is. I've used P2L and found it very easy - however, I did learn about Luxrender and am capable of writing my own shaders, so take what I say about ease of use at face value. LOL.

Either way, same principle applies - you need to think of it differently than Poser, no matter which one you ultimately decided to use. You can use mesh lights for either Reality or P2L, even a simple low res ball prop will do or a plane. You unfortunately are looking at much longer render times than you were ever used to from Poser. And that doesn't matter if you use Pose2Lux or Reality since it's Luxrender itself, being unbiased, that does a slow render. Just lettin' ya know. LOL.

To recap:

Pose2Lux is free - not quite as easy as Reality is said to be. Probably somewhat more customizable since you can use any shader you can write out in XML. For Poser 6 and up. Will not update your Luxrender render in real time if you make changes. You must re-export.

Reality is not free - snazzier interface, you need less Luxrender knowledge, sends any changes you make in Poser to Luxrender and updates it in real time. Somewhat easier to use than Pose2Lux.

For either of the above, you will still need Luxrender installed.

I had Pose2Lux exported images in my gallery if you wanna peek. They look just like Reality exported renders. LOL.

Laurie