I was looking into getting an alternate renderer for Poser 9, & have been told (here) that P9 only recognizes 2 gigs of RAM.  So I'm supposing--merely supposing--that Hivewire's Reality 3, since it's a plug in for Poser, may recognize more RAM and therefore go more quickly than firefly.
I eMailed Hivewire several days ago, but haven't heard back, so I thought i'd ask here.

Any help appreciated.  :)

Marc

Hi.

Reality is written by Pret-a-3D, myself, not Hivewire. Hivewire is one of our distributor and they are good friends.

If you have a 64-bit processor then LuxRender, the renderer used by Reality will be able to see all the memory that you have. That has nothing to do with rendering speed though.
LuxRender is a physics-based renderer. It is used to get the most accurate, realistic renders possible. Speed is not its strong point since it runs absolutely accurate physics simulations, something not available with standard Poser.
The speed of rendering with Lux is directly related to the number of CPU cores that you have. With a modern machine, 8 cores or more, it will run at a very nice speed. In addition it allows you to render while using Poser. Also, Lux can use as many render nodes as you have, since it's Open Source and has no licensing limits.

Lastly, Lux can stop and resume a render at any point.

Keep in mind that Lux renders the whole image and it refines the result in successive passes. This mode of working allows you to see the whole picture instead of waiting for the render to happen from top to bottom. In many cases this workflow is very beneficial and it can cut the delivery time of the final artwork.

You can see Reality and Lux in action in our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PretA3D

Hope this helps.

Thankyou for the clarification.  I have 4 cores with 8 gigs on a 64 bit machine (but P9 is 32).  Sounds like it could work better anyway!

:)

Cheers;

Marc

Well, "better" is a word that can have many, many interpretations :)
It is much better for me, but I wrote the software because I was frustrated by the lighting systems found in all 3D softwares. I'm a photographer and used to lighting with real lights. Biased rendering, what is found in the majority of 3D programs, does not use realistic lighting.

When I saw what Lux was capable of doing I wrote Reality as a bridge between Poser and Lux. Reality takes all your Poser materials and automatically creates a version of those using physical models. It comes with its own set of lights and props that can give you, among other things, real water, predictable lighting based on how rel-life light works.

The results can be seen in our gallery: http://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com/

Is it better? Without taking anything away from Poser's excellent renderer, I do think so. I like realism and I like lighting in a simpler, predictable way, so in that regard it is better. In the last four years I used nothing else.

Cheers.

Lastly, yes, 4 cores will be used at full power. 

okay!  Yes, was intrigued by the lighting idea, since I work in a photo lab and see all sorts of bad lighting situations in people's prints...and Poser lights never seemed "right' to me...

Thanks!