Quote - > Quote - My main issue / point of concern is probably material setup time, as opposed to render time.

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Your best approach for scenes is to avoid fancy shaders and scripts that take advantage of Firefly. That's what they are designed for: to use some of the most esotheric and advanced features of Firefly. If you use a different renderer they are out of place.

When you use Reality and LuxRender you gain many of the same benefits for free; just use the standard materials that are associated with the models. If it's a figure that you set up then just use the standard mat files of Poser without SSS. Reality sets its own SSS for there is no need to have complex shaders at the source. In fact you will get excellent results out-of-the-box using the standard Poser shaders.

If you need glass there is no simpler approach than right-clicking on the material in Reality and selecting "Glass". The same is for Metal, Velvet or Cloth.

Start with a new scene and keep it simple. There is much less need to tweak shaders with Reality when you use the approach described above.

Hope this helps.

Thanks Paolo

But I do appreciate this difference... i.e. Reality just needs the texture maps (diffuse, bump, etc) and perhaps procedural patterns (if these are assigned in place of, or as well as, an image map).

The set up time I'm referring to is the time it takes to go through each material zone, in Reality Studio, and assign a material there (e.g. glass, metal, velvet, cloth).

This is, in effect, not too different from what I now do in Poser (as all these fancy shaders I am using there are, to a great extent ready-mades and... now with EZ Mat moreso... quick to apply to the base textures).

The time it would take to set up materials in a scene like the one I posted would likely be about the same either way.

But I would have to choose one or other path at the outset... or duplicate effort.

Hence, as I say, I probably just need to gradually familiarise myself with Reality enough so that I can make that choice, of which renderer I am going to choose to use for a given image, upfront, when I have an idea for an image and start to build the scene for it.

Anyway...

...just further to what you said there above, I have a quick question that I hope you don't mind if I interject here...

I take it if my figure has SSS mats (or other complex shaders) in Poser, that I don't have to strip the shader down to just it's texture maps before I work with the scene in Reality? i.e. does Reality Studio ignore any Poser shader nodes it doesn't need, if they are present?

Many thanks