my personal opinion: Poser is really great for artistic purposes and for creating scene geometry, but will start to show its weaker points the closer I get to the (photo)realistic and photographic borders. The issues are in the fundamentals of its lighting, of its materials, of its rendering, of all combinations thereof, and so on. Fundamentals as in: it's not going to improve whatever they try, and won't be fixed even in Poser Pro 2100.

I do master all of it, but the closer I get to the photo-real / photographic border the more time it takes from me to get all Poser details right, and the more it takes my high-end machine to render out something reasonable. Good portraits etc take say 15 mins to set up, the rest of the day to get the lights, materials etc fine, say a day for all test renders and half day for the final runs. Or more, plus post. Say (half) a week.

So I've decided to switch to Octane. It takes some money on the SW (fine on Windows, not yet there on Mac, not yet there for DazStudio), and on the HW as well (video cards, it needs nVidia wont run on AMD/ATI), but lighting is easier, materials are easier, rendering is easier, adjustments are completely interactive, results are 10 times better than the best Poser results I can achieve, rendering is 100x faster (3 mins instead of 5 hours), and I get a plethora of render passes as image-layers in one (32bit per color EXR) file for any post-handling. 

So I do my scenes in Poser for geometry (posing, animation, etc) and texturing, but all the details lighting, materials and camera stuff is done in Octane.
Now the same scene takes the same 15 mins to set up, plus say 15 - 45 mins to get all details right on render, light and materials, and a few minutes for the render. Thats half an hour instead of half a week. So I can work from Monday-Friday on a 30 sec animation, and get it high-quality rendered on Saturday+Sunday (30 sec * 30fps * 3min/frame / 60 mins per hour = 45 hours). In Poser, it would have taken me 30 sec * 30fps * 5hrs/frame = half a year for a lower quality result.

To my findings, the Reality+LuxRender is an intermediate solution. Results can be made as good as Octane but - even at full GPU mode - at say 10x to 30x the rendertime, and as being far less interactive it takes quite more user time as well. But it's much cheaper, covers nVidia as well as ATI, runs fine on Mac, and established for DazStudio too. Using the lastest versions of Pose2Lux instead of Reality makes the kit totally free - and adds a fine handling of Dynamic hair, which Reality still can't (while Octane does now).

Just my 2ct 

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though