Obviously, everythign is easier in Poser since it has a lower learning curve and simpler user interface, and that goes for lighting as well.

But how does doing lighting in Poser compare to the high end software like Maya, 3dstudiomax, etc?

Can you achive better Lighting quality with the other software?

If so, which App would you consider to be the best choice for doing lighting?

Poser lights are klugy and weak compared to Maya C4d Lightwave etc lighting

Quote - Obviously, everythign is easier in Poser since it has a lower learning curve and simpler user interface, and that goes for lighting as well.

I'm not sure where this idea comes from!

Only the core functions of Poser, clothes and morphs interacting with the underlying figure are generally 'easier'.

For me, lighting in Poser is much more difficult than in just about any other application. I use Octane a lot, and good lighting for it is quite simple for me compared to Poser. Carrara, though not in the same league as the apps you mentioned, lighting is also quite easy for me. In the past I used C4D quite a bit, and lighting was quite easy. I've found lighting in 3DS Max, Maya,  Thea Render,  and Lux Render quite intuitive as well.

I've always stuggled with Poser lighting. The improvements in the last couple of version have made it a bit easier for me, but I still prefer to render I something else (Reality/Lux or Octane) primarily due to my struggles with lighting.

Never used it but is v-ray what you're thinking of? Would be good to have v-ray plug in for poser :)

To be fair to Poser, its an animation tool so a Reyes based render engine like Firefly seems appropriate for what it does but the lighting functionality is a bit basic.

I use Maxwell for accuracy but its very basic in functionality (less than poser), a light bulb is just a light source, you don't get options for light cones, glow, excluding objects etc.

If you're interesting in this area then going onto youtube and viewing the various tutorials for the apps you're interested in.

As always the grass in the other field seems greener until you jump across the fence and find there's alot of weeds there too.

I must admit I am slowly losing interest in Poser because of the struggles I have with lighting. It doesn't help matters havig glaucoma and loss of visdion in my left eye, but I don't struggle nearly as much with lights in DAZ Studio 4.6. Being fairly intelligent and capable of following instructions, I have watched a bazillion tutorials on Youtube and other places around the web and still have issues with it. I can still never get the lights to my satisfaction. I've been using Poser since P7, and currently own PP2010. I can afford to upgrade to 2014, but I hesitate to do so because of the lighting issues I encounter. 

I am not saying that others don't do an excellent job with lighting in Poser - it just seems that no matter how I try, the results are dismal. I'm a patient man, but enough is enough. I seldom use Poser any more, except for testing of content that I have made in Blender. Even that can be a royal pain due to Poser's scaling methods! I love working in CG and creating content, but I am a bit tired of banging my head on the wall because the lighting never comes out to my satisfaction. 

My two cents...

C~

The lighting in software like Octane and Luxrender, and some of the others like Vray, are far more advanced.  You can select a light, and tell the engine it's a 40w bulb, and it will render it as a 40w bulb intensity in the scene (provided your scene is using real world scale).  You can't do that with Poser's default lighting.  However, Poser's lighting algorithm has improved over the years.  It used to be just a standard scanline REYES renderer, incapable of bouncing light at all.  Now we can have, at least, a Freshman introduction of IDL and some other goodies.  Still, it's not perfect, and not near the level of sophistication of some high quality render engines in other applications.  If not for the work of Baggins,and some others, with complex shaders to compensate for the light shortcomings, we'd be in big trouble.  Poser's render engine is NOT a path tracer.  So it's not going to deliver the easy, instant results of an Octane or (not so instant) Luxrender.  The lighting algorithm in those applications is highly sophisticated and complex, based on real world physics.  They are using Path Tracing mechanics to trace the light throught he scene until you set an upper limit to stop it.

Poser's lighting system is about 5 years, or more, behind the rest of the CG industry, and has always been playing "catch up" in that field..

as the above. Poser Firefly is just not made for anything photoreal, although it's making nice moves in that direction. But in the end it's just not there, fundamentally.It's not only the lighting, its also materials, camera, etc.

In most cases, the native renderers for other packs fall short as well. That's why 3rd party / separate products (Octane, VRay, Mental Ray, ... ) have a place in the market. Max usualy comes with Mental Ray (Autodesk too) next to its scanline renderer.

On the other hand, various native renderers could hold their position while being integrated with real footage in large screen stuff (MojoWorld, Vue, ...). But no-one even dreams on doing that with Poser Firefly :-)

just my 2cts

Quote - On the other hand, various native renderers could hold their position while being integrated with real footage in large screen stuff (MojoWorld, Vue, ...). But no-one even dreams on doing that with Poser Firefly :-) just my 2cts

Most high end engines can also render composite passes automatically with each render.  Vray is famous for this, and so is MentalRay, because they have incredible control and depth to their render pass output.  You can specify no less than 20 individual render pass channels to output from Vray.  This would include passes for diffuse, Zdepth, specular, reflection, glossy, direct light, ambient light, GI, displacement, normals, objectID, material ID, AO, and many more.  This is what really makes a huge difference in the resulting realism, and matching it up in post with a photo or video/film footage.  Without deep render pass control, the render engine is only useful for hobbyists and possibly some indie artists.  All big time studios render in up to a dozen different passes, and composite the results with Nuke, or Flame/Lustre workstations.

The final results you see in movies are never the results created solely by the render engine.  They have been tweaked an color graded to death, in super-powered compositing workstations, which depend on the render engine's ability to output passes.  Post-compositing is the single most important element in any pro pipeline.  It's where all the magic happens, so to speak.  Vue is used by major studios not only for it's incredible environment creation features, but also because it can output many compositing channels, and separate it's light passes into alpha channels, etc.  So along with the power of the lighting and rendering algorithm, this becomes the most important option of any render engine, if it's to compare to the "big boys" for studio-grade output.  Firefly has a few minor options for this, but nothing which compares to Vray or MentalRay.  Even the old-school Scanline option in 3dsmax has dozens of options for render pass output, and can "bake" procedural maps to texture coordinates, etc.  Very powerful stuff that is well ahead of Firefly's capability.

well, actually I'm not that sure about Firefly's lack of capabilities on this.

I can get Normal, ToonID = materialID, ZDepth, XYZ-position, UV-position, Diffuse, Specular and Shadow plus the final result itself separately on a per (direct) light bases organized in a well structured PSD file. I can seperate IDL lighting as well, I can create my own pass contents too (Custom output in the PoserSurface definition) and I can render object masks easily as well. It's a bit hidden in the Render Settings and the various standard scripts, but it's there.

having Poser render passes discussed in one of the tuts on my Missing Manuals site ( http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl/?p=388 ), render passes from Poser are not the issue I will complain about quickly although there is room for improvement of course.

all those Vue options, are they in my Vue Complete too or in Vue Infinite only? like the options above are all in PoserPro but hardly in Poser itself.

my opinion that is. But anyway, OP was discussing lighting, not passes. let's try to stick to the topic. In the meantime, I really agree with the importance of the post process support in a good tool.

Very interesting, aRtBee.  I knew about Zdepth, ToonID, and AO passes, but not about the others.  I didn't realize Poser could call up specular, reflection, or refraction passes, let alone the others you mentioned.  Very interesting.

Vue Infinite supports multipass rendering in a very deep and organized way.  Not sure about the other versions, but Infinite supports every rendering element, every layer, every material and every single object in a separate pass.  Vue actually has one of the most in-depth render pass system I've seen in any render engine, including the ability to separate cloud masks, ecosystem masks, and UVW coordinates in their own pass.  Very deep compositing feature set.  Plus support for exporting G-Buffer information in RLA and RPF formats for compositing in Flame, Avid, or whatever.

Back on topic. 

http://poser.smithmicro.com/poserfusion2014.html

Max has the most plugins of all of them.

is modo any good for rendering/lighting?

it seems to have a very intuitive interface and workflow, much similar to how zbrush is for modeling/sculpting

While Maxxmodelz is absolutely correct, I believe Poser gets a bad reputation in the lighting department mainly from the fact that a large group of the user base is not too concerned with lighting, and their renders look "poser-ish".
I mean no offense by that, art is freedom of choice.

In my opinion realistic light in Poser requires an encompassing light object. Adding one (with a high quality texture) will almost always make a render much more realistic. 

Ever since IDL came in with PP2010 I have almost exclusively used a single spot light set VERY far away with start and end distances, along with an inverted high res sphere just encompassing the scene. A HDR texture from my growing collection plugs into ambient on the sphere.  That is it for any outdoor scene. The spot color is picked out of the image sun spot and aligned to it.

Any outdoor image in my gallery after the space marines uses this setup.

Bazze and Populus are two members that post Modo renders if you want to see examples

templargfx - prehaps Poser should come with that kind of set-up as the default, the three point light system is ok if the user wants to render indoor studio lighting but from the galleries it appears most people want to render outdoor type scenes.

You only have to watch those threads here where all the tech talk about rendering and lighting goes on to realise how good Poser actually is at it (and that's extremely good IMVHO).

What do you need for lighting that Poser doesn't already provide?
Poser has Points, Inifinites, Spots, Globals, and even Glowing Object Lights!

Honestly can't imagine what else a person needs to create any sort of lighting!

I've had two of the High-End packages and no longer have either of them.  Cinema4D and LightWave were both at my disposal once.  I liked them both, but it wasn't hard to let go of either of them if I'm perfectly honest about it.  Using FireFly has been the opposite experience for me, I totally love it, I just wish it could harness the power of the GPU to speed up the rendering.

I hear it needs fixing regards refraction stuff, but other than that, it looks pretty damn amazing to me, I love the output from it and see no reason why I couldn't get a photo from it if I wanted to.  I know that without even trying, simply because the features needed to pull it off are already there.

Displacement is superb in Poser as well.  Compare it to, say, Carrara and there is no comparison, and from what I recall, even LightWave displacement is nowhere near as good as Poser's.  I love Poser, I just wish they'd sort the issues with it.

render engines ,lights ,shaders ,maps ,filters.
2D post production app's & there plugs.
etc etc so on and so forth.

All gives different effects.

Quote -
Displacement is superb in Poser as well.  Compare it to, say, Carrara and there is no comparison, and from what I recall, even LightWave displacement is nowhere near as good as Poser's.  I love Poser, I just wish they'd sort the issues with it.

In my experience, displacement in Carrara works perfectly fine. I've always found displacement easier to set up in Carrara than in Poser because you don't need to use a math node to "correct" the displacement values like you do in Poser. But displacement in Carrara seems to work just as well as in Poser when set up properly, you just can't expect shaders set up for use in Poser to work 100% "out of the box" in Carrara without user intervention. Typically, Carrara completely drops the displacement information from Poser shaders, and you have to set up displacement yourself.

Now, back to the topic by the OP. If you are comfortable with and good at  lighting in Poser, you will probably need to re-learn how to light properly in another application. You will also need to learn the materials/shader system of the other application as well to get the most out of your renders. This is  also true when changing from any 3D application/renderer to another one, unless you can use the same render engine in both applications (i.e. using Octane with Poser and 3DS).

Haven't tried displacement in the latest Carrara (althought I have it).  But if it's any good they must have replaced the technology it uses.  Before, it used to depend on the subdivision of the geometry, awful system, in fact I remember putting in a request on the bug tracker literally begging them to replace it with the tech they use in DS!

Sounds like they changed it if it's any good now!

Quote -
Haven't tried displacement in the latest Carrara (althought I have it).  But if it's any good they must have replaced the technology it uses.  Before, it used to depend on the subdivision of the geometry, awful system, in fact I remember putting in a request on the bug tracker literally begging them to replace it with the tech they use in DS!

Sounds like they changed it if it's any good now!

You still need to increase your sub-d levels for best results, which is best done by increasing the sub-d of just the shader/render. Would be nice too have it done more automagically, but still very simple to setup.

Poser is very good when it comes to lighting, but it isn't easy. I'll be honest, I'm still a bit old school..... AO and IBL are the things I do like and I've mastered them pretty well, especially when comes to lighting toon scenes. IDL is something else and although I do see the potential, I have not mastered it all. I've played with it, but not really in depth.

For me it doesn't add anything at all, if I want realism, I'll use Vue instead of Poser. With Vue I'm able to create realistic even lighting that is close to a photo in no time. I couldn't do that as fast in Poser at all. It took me years to get good at using IBL in Poser and I know it will take me a long time to get the hang of IDL. But I don't need to. If I want realism, I'll render in Vue. If I want to render toon stuff or want that typical poserish look, I'll use Poser. I've just released a light set over at Hivewire3D. intended for toon renders. IBL based, since that's what I'm good at at. But even though they're intended for toon renders, some are using them for realistic stuff and they do create some impressive renders with it.

The great thing about Poser is that for people who don't want to master it's light system, yet want good results, they can visit any of the many marketplaces for Poser and find what they need or want.

Don't you just love Poser? If you can't master a part of it, just buy the knowledge of someone who's good at that what you lack and you can create cool stuff as well. That's the power of Poser!

Lights ,Lights ,Lights .Always talking about Lights with Render Engines.

If you don't know everything you need before you ever hit render.
The best Lights & Render Engines in the world will be all but useless.
& what good is 2D Post production with a worthless render.

I'm a fan of all CGI .but even in the High End Galleries Humans seldom look real.

Black & Whites will get a bit closer.
convert ya color render to black & white is a way to test the flaws.

Even HollyWoods not so good at getting realist Humans.
kingdome of heaven,Superman .done good.
matrix ,ah ,so so.
scorpion king.I was embarrassed for them.
I still think all the movies are killer.

There's been a spate of posts recently moaning about Poser's lack of ability in all kinds of areas, and comparing it unfavourably to other 3D programs.

Here's something to bear in mind: Poser 10 will cost you $129 (if you buy today at SM's website).

At the risk of stating the obvious: if you want the (undoubtedly superior) capabilities of programs like Vue, Marvellous Designer, 3DS Max etc. you'll have to buy them, and you'll pay double, treble, maybe 25 times what you paid for Poser.

cspear, you are right, for what poser cost, you get (quality - price ratio) a better lighting and render quality and options that many other "more professional" applications.

I must admit that I dismissed poser as a final rendering option from the very beginning.
I started "3D Art" with a seat of  metacreations bryce2 and fractal designs poser2
and even back then then I was exporting my primitive poser2 figures as .obj files and rendering them
in Bryce2.

Some 18 years later I have used and still have at My disposal
Maxon Cinema4D version 11.5 studio's "Advanced Render" engine
Nextlimits Maxwell 1.7 ( collecting dust)
ChaosGroup Vray for C4D
MODO401
Newteks Lightwave 7.5
and Eon's Entry level Vue6 easel.
I recently fell back "in love" with C4D's native render engine and use it almost exclusively.
trying to use poser Firefly for my purposes ( animation) would be unthinkable.

"What do you need for lighting that Poser doesn't already provide?
Poser has Points, Inifinites, Spots, Globals, and even Glowing Object Lights!
Honestly can't imagine what else a person needs to create any sort of lighting!"

Well how about the native ability to load a GI Daylight environment preset like my basic $50 USD version of vue6 easel (see attached)
and have it render with GI in a reasonable amount of time
without fiddling about with some silly "envirodome" prop.
yes I understand the most users do Indoor portrait shots
but it would still be nice.

"render with GI in a reasonable amount of time"

oscar mike gulf, yoo too funny

**
@Wolf359**
I still don't see any shortcoming in Poser rendering apart from it not harnessing the GPU to speed it up.

When I had Poser 5, I really wasn't that fond of FireFly but that was for two reasons.  The main reason was that I didn't grasp how a lot of the stuff worked together and got a false impression of it.  The other reason is that I was obsessed with Bryce at the time, and to be honest, FireFly and it's nodes scared the crap out of me compared to Bryce.

I still get that impression to an extent when I see aRtBee, Baggins, and Miss Nancy discussing all that refraction stuff, but even so, reading it only reinforces further what a powerful renderer FireFly must be, and how powerful it's node system is.

I totally agree on the animation thing, I personally don't know how they have the nerve to call Poser an "animation tool" because it's features in that respect are so far behind it's hard to stomach.  But the Poser interface and FirefFly Renderer, to me at least, are what attract me to it.

I can't think of any program better for working up a figure scene and rendering in than Poser.

• Stability, forget it.
• Animation, as long as you're really old-school perhaps.

But for lighting and rendering, nope, can't see anything wrong apart from it not harnessing the GPU to speed-up render times.  If SM get their act together, give the program a reputation for rock-solid stability instead of flakiness, harness the GPU for FireFly acceleration, upgrade the animation features ...

Poser would be one seriously desirable program, make no mistake.

Posers node are great and not even that complicated, problem is that some tend to make things overcomplicated and scare others away from believing they can use nodes as well.

You can expand your options for rendering and lighting quite affordably:

Reality 3 is around $28 in the store here, there's a bit of a learning curve but it can produce beautiful results. 

Vue Frontier is $99, or you can download Vue Infinite PLE for free.

If SM would make Poser's lighting just a little more sophisticated and do something with the way atmospheric effects are controlled (the current options are almost unusable), I might never have to use anything except FireFly.

Posers lighting is simple, easy to understand, and true to mother nature.

As long as you keep 2 definitions in the back of your head.

ONE : There is only ONE sun out there.
TWO : The ONLY thing we see in real life is IDL.

Translated to Poser:

• One single Infinite light to make a sun.
• Load free BB's sphere to get the IDL distributed.
• Always render with IDL enabled. 

For inside renders?

• Think light.

• Be light.
  And certainly for inside renders : The same 2 definitions are valid.

• Light bulbs that make light.

• IDL is ALL we see.

=> Diffused light is all we see inside a room, unless one of the light bulbs is shining directly in our eyes.

The rest? ? ?
Is for artistical purposes only.

QUOTE:
"Posers node are great and not even that complicated, problem is that some tend to make things overcomplicated and scare others away from believing they can use nodes as well."

For me it's the opposite, I watch those threads so that I can piece the bits I don't understand to the bits I do understand.  It can be overwhelming sometimes, but it demonstrates the power of the program and demonstrates what you need to learn to do the really clever stuff.

Nothing that works right on a node can be wasted information, because even if you do it another way, you might still need the other method for something else, and without knowing about it, you might not posess the knowledge to get what you want out of the nodes.

areas for improvement (or missing, as they might not be improved anyway) on lighting and rendering. Just my opinion.

 - area lighting, so I can make a proper softbox as used in photography / portraits. Now I have to make some Ambient Glowing thing with IDL (which does not make highlights).

 - lights with a size, and a spatial profile, so I can make decent interior lighting with proper lamps on walls and ceilings etc.

 - lighting / rendering: the separation of specular and reflection presents me with balancing problems and complex lighting rigs to get decent results in reflective scenes. The "advanced" renderers just have reflection of everything.

 - rendering / materials: reflection / refraction work on diffuse lights from objects only, not on any direct lighting. As said above I can't get highlights from reflected lightbeams, and refractive objects are opaque to direct light so all shadows go wrong. Until I start mixing in transparency, and then the asperines kick in as shown in other threads. In addition, colored or darkened transparency (as in fluids and solid glass objects) is treated as a surface effect. And colored transparant objects do not produce colored shadows. The "advanced" renderers just have absorbing materials.

Other requirements can be filled with IDL and atmospherics, but these two don't interact (only direct lights have an "Atmospheric Strength") - although I can run some additional research on that. Can I make a lightbeam from an IDL source like I can with a spotlight, and does Poser Fog react on it?

And Poser misses the postwork features to mimic reallife camera and film effects.

So, in my opinion, Poser is great for artistic purposes. In the photoreal arena, it's working hard and can come close, but that's about it. Other tools are just better in those areas (and worse in others), so I'm happy with the possibilities to step out to LuxRender and Octane and Vue.
Especially mixing transparency and reflection /refraction /fresnel, balancing specularity and reflection, combining all these with diffuse and translucence/subsurface-scattering, creating the proper aireal scattering and radiosity to get lighting and shadows softer, and the role of the Gamma Sandwich on all this, are at least hurdles in the race, to put it mildly. Some people are helped by throwing physics books at it, others are only more confused that way. Poser just isn't perfect, and there is no one-way to do it.

In the meantime, from all the literature, pro sites, pro tutorials and so on around, I do underwrite the message that having the goood tool, or a tool that can come close is just part of the job. Photorealism is not in the renderer or MatRoom capabilities (only). The ability to make good, detailed, varied textures is at least as relevant. Attention to Detail is the main message of the main studios in all learning environments. No repetition, no symmetries, dirt damage details and distortion do the job.

 My 2ct again.