Quote - Still I understand that lights is what can make or break an art piece. I was wondering however, if Lux would be a much better choice to go with. Does it calculate lighting and shadows better than firefly? How well does it handle lights compared to firefly? My problem with getting good quality renders in Poser has a lot to do with not knowing where the lights should be, or how they should be edited in the material room to improve the quality. I've tried the whole environmentsphere trick and that didn't really do much. Sometimes I'm trying to figure out if a light source should be closer to a figure, or further away from them for quality. There have been few occassions where the figures will render nicely, but the environment would look dull or shadows had a splooch effect. Some shadows looked too harsh to even be believable. So I'd try to just reduce shadows from 1000 down to 500 or sometimes 600. 

Lux is an unbiased render engine, it will calculate physically accurate lighting, Firefly is baised which is why using more than three lights in a scene can be a common thing. Fortunately for Poser, IDL solves many problems but it still cannot compare to physically correct lighting.

I'm an artist and photographer so lighting has always been fundamental to everything I do, this didn't always translate to Poser because lighting in Poser doesn't work the way it does in IRL. I discovered Reality and Lux and everything changed because instead of fooling around with lights and hoping that something would work, I setup my portrait scenes lighting just the way I would if I were taking a portrait of someone and it just works because that's what an unbiased render engine does.

If you're unsure of where lights would go in Poser, Lux should be a breeze since all you have to do is turn on a light in your room and you you've got 1000 examples.