Hi guys,

I know that the main factor when it comes to achieving photo-realism in your character is the artist's skill-set, but with that aside which rendering engine do you think has a slight advantage when it comes to creating photo-realistic characters?

Are physically based(unbiased) rendering engine more suitable? other than the built in poser or daz rendering engine, or perhaps luxrender, does anyone have experience with any other rendering engine?

I work on mainly small projects and still images with the focus on character (so nothing too complex or contains too many objects or scenes)

I do however plan on giving a try on animation as well in the near future.

Would Arnold be a good rendering engine? I've heard, so much good things about it !

anywayo, hope to hear from everyone soon, i'm open to all suggestions!

thanks in advance

Solid Angle's Arnold renderer is the absolute best global illumination, realistic render engines on the planet.  It's intended for serious production work by major studios, and the price reflects that goal.  It's $1000 for a permanent license, but there is also a 5 license minimum.  So you'd have to spend $5000 to get Arnold, and it only has plugins for Maya, Houdini, and XSI.  So you'd have to figure out a way to get it working with your Poser content for animation.  Not a good solution for a hobbyist or amateur.

Luxrender is great, but slow.  Very slow.  Plenty  of support and a direct Poser plugin available for it.

If you have the hardware, then Octane is a great choice.  It's quality output is as good as Luxrender, but it's many times faster, as it uses your GPU to render.  So the faster your graphics card, the faster your renders.  Even with a mid-range gaming Nvidia card, Octane outputs blazing fast renders at amazing quality.

Lightwave 9.6(for now)

Octane. Invest time in the learning curve (lighting, materials), and money in nVidia hardware. Note: within a few weeks (I hope) Octane 2.0 will be issued, plus a renewed Poser plugin. It's worth the wait, to avoid eventual extra costs.

a lot of it is the textures on a mesh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07H7xeUnGE

just need to watch to time stamp to 4:19.
don't matter what app Andrews using all app's work the same

so if the mesh is not textured the way you need no render engine will give you what you want.

You can bet the meshes ya see in Arnold was textured for Arnold.

you can use any render engine.
some of the Artist here get killer renders with Poser render engines.

can always tweak them with 2D app's n filters.
I like http://www.topazlabs.com/

Attached Link: http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Poser/?page_id=298

Octane 2 was released today.  You can check out the Poser plugin features for Octane 2 at the link above.

Paul

Unbias render engines are slow if you want to generate realistic animations particularly if it involves complex scattering like SSS. The examples I've seen  for Octane were fast but  had used simplier materials (don't know what version was used). I've seen a few interesting videos on Keyshot but they have all involved environmental lighting so possibly its optimised for that.

The other thing you need to consider is how will you get the animation into the Render engine, if its from Poser you'll need to use an existing plugin or be a good programmer as manual importing obj and assigning materials takes a long time.

go to the gallery and search for octane and you will see lots of examples of renders in Octane done via the poser and DS plugins

The poser plugin for Octane is also able to render poser animations

I've switched to Vue as my render engine. It works great with Poser, but it's slow in still renders (that's the only thing I do), so I expect it to be very slow in animation.

My results are very nice and I know of many more poser users who use it, but if you want speed, don't go for it.

Quote - Unbias render engines are slow if you want to generate realistic animations particularly if it involves complex scattering like SSS. The examples I've seen  for Octane were fast but  had used simplier materials (don't know what version was used). I've seen a few interesting videos on Keyshot but they have all involved environmental lighting so possibly its optimised for that. The other thing you need to consider is how will you get the animation into the Render engine, if its from Poser you'll need to use an existing plugin or be a good programmer as manual importing obj and assigning materials takes a long time.

Octane is different than most other unbiased render engines in that it comes with more than one render kernel (algorithm).  You can use Octane in Path Tracing mode, which is basically the same as Luxrender, only much much faster.  However, you can also use it in a slightly biased, Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode, which is more like Brute Force GI in biased render engines like Vray.  The quality is still astoundingly good, but render times can be dramatically improved over Path Tracing, for very complex shader structures like SSS for skin.  So, depending on the kernel you use in Octane, SSS may or may not present a significant hit to render time, like it can in other unbiased engines.  That's a big plus in regard to flexibility, and quality vs time considerations.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who believes that the native render engine  poser (firefly) relative speed/quality is outstanding, and if one takes the time to learn how to use , can do real wonders with it

Aldebaran - I'm still with you, Firefly does have great qualities, but also some (fundamental) shortcomings which become more and more apparent when one comes closer to high-end photorealism. Which is just A way of using Poser, not THE way. Then one might consider using other tools as well. Plus, some tools offer similar results like firefly but with a less error-prone process and a less steeper learning curve. Then, all those other tools do have their shortcomings too.

In the end, one can only get good results from a render when one takes the trouble learing it. Each one comes with its own lighting, camera, render settings and render management. They all can take scene object geometry. The extent in which they can take over each others material definitions varies enormously.

It's true  aRtBee   you have a good  point, my opinion is based on that I not
 do  high-end photorealism  and the firefly engine meets to my expectations amply, but like all things , all opinions depend on the needs and tastes of each one of us

Someday in the future I would be interested to try render with octane

I just put my renderer comparison findings in http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2882017