it says rib files.

was reading this from their site, haz the magic path-tracing,
and it's free.

(heyyy, the right column with the main calendar is blocking half my text
box here.)

Rendering Features
3Delight is an advanced renderer featuring a wide variety of features such as path-tracing and REYES rendering algorithms, multiple importance sampling for physically plausible materials, depth of field, motion blur, area lights, subsurface scattering, surface displacement, multi-camera rendering (stereo rendering), image based lighting, atmospheric effects and deep shadow maps. Very high quality texturing and image antialiasing is offered with a complete set of selectable filters (including Sinc and Catmull-Rom). Images can be output in most commong formats including EXR and deep EXR (EXR 2.0).

Geometry Support
3Delight supports a complete set of RenderMan® geometry: subdivision surfaces, polygons, patches (B-spline, Bezier, Catmull-Rom and others), NURBS (with trim-curves), Curves (for Fur & Hair), quadrics and procedural geometry. Also, user-defined variables, including vertex and facevarying variables, attached to geometry are fully supported. In contrast to all competing renderers, 3Delight doesn't tessellate smooth surfaces into polygons prior to rendering. This means that subdivion surfaces are rendered to sub-pixel accuracy at any zoom level.

Have you heard it should work with Poser?  The site seems to advertise only for softimage and Maya.

Pappy

Im not sure why you would want to, for a few reasons.

First off, the free version of 3Delight Standalone is core limited, so fast renders are out of the question.

Next biggest hurdle are the texture setups. Poser Firefly shaders and Renderman compliant ones are completely different shader setups. Yes Poser will export a scene to RIB, but it doesn't convert the texture setups to Renderman. Some of the things you can do in Firefly with shaders, can't be done in Renderman anywhere near close to the same way.

Your also going to be stuck with static scenes, or do frame by frame exports as well. A lot (most) of the Poser rigging doesn't work in RIB format.

Can Poser scenes be set up to render in 3delight?

Yes they can, but it is a lot of work and far faster to just open the scene in Daz Studio and render it from there. It is the same render engine core.

3Delight is capable of doing very nice renders no matter what version of it you use. But only if you know how to set it all up. There may be a standalone version of Hypershade (Part of Maya) floating around, or something similar. Hypershade is a program to set up Renderman Shaders without doing it manually in a text editor.

i got all excited by the path-tracing.  

but the ds shade mixer isn't intuitive in the slightest ->.<

if i win lottoery, i want to buy the cinema4d and vray

There is an "Export to RIB" option in Poser (RenderMan Interface Bytestream), and RIB files can be rendered in 3Delight. I've never used it, I would guess that it would take a fair ammount shader work/editing in a text editor to get good results. But if your feeling adventurous, it migh be worth trying (or not).

As shvrdavid noted, it would probably be easier to open the scene in DS, edit your shaders in DS, export to RIB, then render in 3Delight. The RIB files exported from DS and rendered in 3Delight look virtually identical to the DS renders. If you have a linux box, I've seen posts stating that a 1 hour render in DS, takes about 5 minutes on the standalone version of 3Delight running on a Linux box.

***"i got all excited by the path-tracing.  ***

but the ds shade mixer isn't intuitive in the slightest ->.<
if i win lottoery, i want to buy the cinema4d and vray"

Hi, Vray for C4D Will NOT support any of posers node based shaders,
only texture mapped based shaders
and the conversion to vray Mats is not always accurate.

Why not just use the free pose to LUX or but the "reality for poser" bridge app for the unbiased Lux renderer?

Quote - i got all excited by the path-tracing.  

Don't put the carriage before the horse ;-)

What is it that you want in your renders? Volumetrics? Caustics? Speed? Not having to tweak parameters? For example, if you want fast caustics, (progressive) photon mapping is almost always better than path tracing, where for outdoor scenes illuminated with a sky dome, a good path tracer is probably a better option.

If you want to try out many render engines without having to spend a lot of money, there are plenty of options for Blender, and as far as I know, both Yafaray and Luxrender have photon mapping modes.

If you just want to use the monte carlo approach to avoid interpolation artifacts, you can simply uncheck "progressive mode" in Poser 10/2014's render settings, crank up the pixel samples and wait. It won't give you caustics, but will use brute force ray tracing for everything, including indirect diffuse light (though no SSS at this point).