Quote - Quite right! Somehow in my ramblings I forgot to add in that if you don't need/want caustics, Firefly can  do everything you need. Regardless of the renderer used, you will need to learn how to optimise your materials and lighting for your image. One big advantage to using Firefly is that with a lot of the available content, most of the work has already been done for you.

I might disagree here.  The presets that come with Firefly, even now, are very outdated, and intended for 3 point lighting, and often don't look good with IDL or global lighting.  The bumps and colors get washed out, and the materials themselves don't look realistic to begin with.  Unless you are bagginsbill, or have all the shaders he puts out there, you've got to be a mathemetician to get realistic, complex materials from Firefly.  Octane actually has more usable preset materials than Poser, and they are all very realistic right out of the box, with ANY lighting situation.

You really have to fight with Firefly to render without artifacts, or blotchiness, at super-high settings, and dense objects.  The most realistic results I've ever seen in CG are being done with the newer render technologies, and unbiased render engines.  There's just no comparison in accuracy and quality.  I think Luxrender is a bad example of this type of rendering genre, because it's the slowest render engine of it's kind.  It may also be the most accurate, but that's debateable.

Point is, unless you require ultra high-end realism from your renders, for film or print, then you should really consider not spending the money.  Because you don't need to.  The example of realism indicated by the OP in this thread doesn't seem extraordinary to me (no offense to the artist of course), so Firefly could easily achieve that result.  If that's the level the OP is looking for, the tools to get it are already on his system in Firefly.  However, if true photorealism is the goal, where someone inexperienced in CG might not know the difference between the render and reality, then Octane or Luxrender are the tools to look at.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.