*Quote - Misty,*As I understand it... in a nutshell...

If you want photo-realism, go to an unbiased Render engine like Lux or Octane.

If you want throughput and production output, and to take full advantage of Poser's Material room, stay with Firefly.

I'm sure if I'm wrong, someone will correct me, but this is what I've gotten out of watching this debate go on the last two years. There is no right answer... it depends on what is important to you. I've seen some beautiful renders come out of Lux, but then again, I've seen even more come out of Firefly.

What's important to you?

Very well said Basic! IMHO Reality 3 is definitely worth the $20 sale pice to add an unbiased renderer to your rendering tool kit. Sure, you could export your scenes to Blender, then use lux from there, but it adds a lot of extra work to your render process. Reality gives you a great interface for editing your lux materials, but the real big plus is how well it converts most of them from Poser to Lux, without the real need for editing many of them.

Pose2Lux looks quite capable too, and probably preferable to exporting to blender to use lux. If I get a chance over the next couple of days Im going to give Pose2Lux a try just for comparison, But I'm guessing Reality will still be a much easier to use product. I also need to give the new version of reality a test run with the updated GPU rendering, just to see how it compares to Octane.

But be aware that after using Poser, you will need to learn how to light your scenes for Reality/Lux. For me, lighting in unbiased renderers is much easier than in Poser, but for some the opposite is true. Some people love Reality/Lux and won't work without it, others find it less appealing. It really depends on if you are willing to put in the extra effort to learn how to do things, and optimize your scenes with a different renderer.

__________________________________________________________

My Rendo Gallery ........ My DAZ3D Gallery ........... My DA Gallery ......