Quote - > Quote - I spent six years of my life struggling with Poser. I can't think of how many hours I spent fighting with poser lights to get the effects that I wanted.  Don't even get me started with poser's material room.

My experience is the opposite. I've used Poser for over 14 years now and never had issues with lights and getting the effect I wanted. I love Poser's material room. In those years I've used it for serious game graphics and comics and all kinds of fun renders. I've had one of my comics printed by a commercial printer, 10,000 copies were printed and everything was done in Poser 8. With the changes in Poser 9 even more power has come available, also in the lights department.

Having said that, I can imagine people wanting to switch. I want to do more nature scenes, for that I've got Vue 10 Studio now. Vue's rendering engine is a power house and the quality you can output if you've got gain the skills and have some patience, are awesome. Whatever I render in there is so much better then in Poser, except.... for portraits. I don't have the Vue skills yet to make those shine. I may get there in time to come, still learning.

Poser works great for me and so far I haven't seen much from Lux that with some skill can be achieved in Poser as well. But if you're constantly fighting poser, I can understand you want to have something you can work with. But..... when people say that switching from Firefly to Lux is giving up speed and gaining quality, it's just not true at all. There are more then enough awesome poser render around that show that poser can do excellent quality as well. I understand people love the new tool, but I wouldn't go as far as saying it's some much better. But Lux has a lot of advantages over firefly, that's for sure and certain things can be achieved easier, but the end result isn't worse the Firefly or better.

Ahhhh.. you said the "v" word.  I attempted to school myself in vue for a bit last year. Talk about wonderful pieces of software.  I created a couple scenes to use for hdri lights.  5000 pixel sphere hdri's took me nearly a full solid day of rendering and that was with fairly simple scenes.  I wish I had the talent to really create in-depth scenes with it; but, I just don't have the time for it.