A big problem is that IDL puts us at the limits of the Firefly renderer; the approximations made to reduce the render times from those of an unbiased renderer such as LuxRender (which is essentially crowd sourced; it's free open-source) can cause significant artifacts.

I agree there is a lot of stuff one needs togather to get good realistic renders without being a Guru.  SM should pay Snarly and BB  to incorporate their freebies such as Envirosphere, SceneFixer and Ezskin.  They should get rid of all the P4 shaders hanging around the included content, too; that might be a good crowdsource project to update them...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Wisdom of bagginsbill:

"Oh - the manual says that? I have never read the manual - this must be why."
“I could buy better software, but then I'd have to be an artist and what's the point of that?"
"The [R'osity Forum Search] 'Default' label should actually say 'Don't Find What I'm Looking For'".
bagginsbill's Free Stuff... https://web.archive.org/web/20201010171535/https://sites.google.com/site/bagginsbill/Home