I've noticed that several people keep calling for caustics in future versions of Poser. I've never really known what that mean so I had to look it up. Now that I know, I'm wondering does Vue, DS or Carrara have caustics? What about Maya or Lightwave?

I'm pretty sure that neither D|S nor Carrara will do caustics, don't know about Vue.

But Reality 3 - available in the marketplace here and elsewhere - does a really nice job of caustics.

Looks to me like D|S can, at least, fake "reflective" caustics:

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/shader_mixer/bricks/dzcausticsurfacebrick/start

I don't know if it can do refractive caustics.

Carrara doesn't do caustics that I am aware of natively.  There might be a plugin for it though, not sure.

Maya, Lightwave, 3dsmax, Cinema4D etc.  all use high end physics based render engines, with at least the option of rendering with caustics.  Engines like Vray, MentalRay, and others do great caustics, both relective and refractive.

Vue sort of does but it kills the render time.  I'm playing with a new render engine in Max (Corona) which is wicked fast and may also do them

Quote - Vue sort of does but it kills the render time.  I'm playing with a new render engine in Max (Corona) which is wicked fast and may also do them

Yep, I just tried Corona for 3dsmax for the first time last week, and it's unbelievably fast.  Makes Octane look slow, even with a decent graphics card.  Great render engine.

So adding caustics to Poser would greatly increase the render time?

Carrara can do caustics...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQcD590XhiY

Quote - Carrara can do caustics...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQcD590XhiY

Yeah, a quick look at the Carrara feature list also indicates that.

Rendering Options - Achieve a new level of realism in your scenes with Soft Shadows, Blurred Reflections, Blurred Transmission, True Ambient Lighting, Caustics, Global Illumination, Ambient Occlusion, HDRI, Motion Blur, Subsurface Scattering, Shadow Catch, Transparency with Absorption, Depth of Field, and more

I worked with Carrara for about 2 months on a collaboration project, and found the renderer quite capable.  Certainly not as deep as something like Vray, but above average.

I think pretty much any Physics-based raytrace engine these days supports some form of Caustics rendering.  It will add a bit of calculation time to the scene, depending on how many materials you have that will generate caustics.  If you don't need caustics, you don't have to use them.

Unbiased engines like Luxrender will render them automatically, without having to worry to much about photon map settings, if it detects refractive materials in the scene, like glass, water, etc.  Other engines require you to enable caustics, and manually set photon mapping parameters for them to work.