I seldom use FireFly - not because it isn't capable of doing some fantastic renders, mostly because I've always had issues with lighting in Poser. I'm not blaming Poser - it's just some sort of mental block I have :blushing:

My favorite application for rendering Poser content is Carrara. I started rendering V3 in Carrara when you had to export from Poser as and obj, import to Carrara, setup the lighting and shaders there, then render. Now it's much easier because most Poser/DAZ content works natively in Carrara.

I've also used Reality3/Lux. I really like it, it makes getting great renders (at least renders that I like) out of Poser easy for me. But, it is slow. Lux has the pure GPU renderer that most people use, a hybrid CPU/GPU renderer, and a pure GPU renderer (OpenCL, so most nvidia and ati video cards will work) which are faster than pure CPU rendering. The hybrid render is faster than CPU only, but not a whole lot faster and also likes a lot of RAM. The pure GPU renderer (SLG) is real fast, but has the strict limitations placed on all GPU renderers, and doesn’t have the full materials support of Lux, so that means you spend a lot more time fixing your materials so they work and look good.

I just recently started looking into Octane, because the development of a plugin for Carrara was announced. I gave the Octane/Poser plugin demo a try and ..... well .... I was really impressed! Easy to use and FAST!!! I was so impressed that I bought Octane and the DS plugin (it's a beta half price right now, and I'm sort of program agnostic) so I could start learning Octane for when the Carrara Plugin becomes available. The resource restrictions are the biggest drawback to Octane. But for simple scenes it's freaking awesome. The imageabove was done while playing with the Poser plugin demo (hence the watermarks). It's a "straight out of the box" render, using an hdr image for lighting, and I didn't edit any materials. I grabbed the image after about 2 min. - could have gone longer and would have been better, but not too bad for a 2 min. render!

It you’re at all interested, I'd strongly suggest you download the Octane demo and Poser plugin demo and give it a test run to see for yourself. It's free, and you don't even have to register on the site to download the demos (but you do need a cuda capable nvidia graphics card).

If you’re interested in seeing what Carrara can do you can take a peek at my Galley here. It used to be a real speed demon compared to Poser, but FireFly has gotten faster and the speed difference isn't as much as it used to be. Again, if you’re interested, download the demo and give it a try.

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