Well, fired up Poser again for the first time in probably a year.  All of the usual frustrations.

 I've spent the last couple of years learning Photography, primarily the same type of stuff I'd do in poser...glamour/pinup type stuff.

 Acquired a lot of gear.

Going back in to poser after a lot of Photography reminds me of the sheer baffling approach to lighting poser takes. 

 If only Poser worked like photography, with strobes/monolights behaving the way they're supposed to, with real-world type modifiers like Softbox, Octobox, Grid, Gel, Snoot, Beauty-Dish and of course overall exposure.

If only Poser's lights were on virtual stands with boom arms to manipulate and direct the light where you want it.  It almost has that, let's face it, but it is mired in 3d space confusion and just yuck. 

 If only Poser simulated aperature of a lens, and produced Bokeh.

 I'd love to see a totally new program, a virtual photography studio that removes the esoteric aspects and functions like a photographer would expect.

Poser is great for making the models, posing the models, but the lighting and rendering leave me cold.

 ...And for the luvva Gawd...it's 2015 and I'm still waiting an hour for a good render.  (Disclaimer:  I'm not waiting...had to ctl-alt-del to shut it down entirely)

Frustrated. 

Hi William.

Not to make a shameless plug about my product, but Reality 4 does make Poser behave like photography. Lights work exactly like real lights; there is a mesh light with Gobo and Snoot, that work exactly as you expect: the larger the light, the softer it is. Lights also have color temperature, exactly like in photography, so, if you mix a light at 3200K with one at 6500K and white balance for the latter you will get an orange hue for the first light. And so on.

Reality 4 - Poser Edition: http://preta3d.com/purchase-reality-4/

Cheers.

Except with Luxrender WTB would be waiting a LOT more than an hour for a render ;). Much better render tho...hehe.

Laurie

And it definitely works a lot more like photography :) You just need a 100-core CPU and you're good to go for lightning-fast renders :p (this is true of most modern renderers, though I wouldn't mind if there was a Keyshot bridge for Poser - attn: plugin developers - hint hint).

 . . but the lighting and rendering leave me cold.

Same here.  That's why I'm so glad there is the free Pose2Lux exporter.  In the time it takes for me to get anything close to what I want after all the tweaking and re-rendering with Poser's Firefly, I would have already have a perfect render from LuxRender.   Check out my tutorial on how to use Pose2Lux.  I got some renders in my gallery that you can see what you can do with it.

I've been at odds with Poser's lighting system for years now, and the introduction of GC AND IDL have made things even more difficult, at least for me. I've messed around with Lux now and again using the Pose2Lux exporter but I'm not willing to wait days for a render, these are not the days of Win95 and Bryce 3! I can get a render out of Poser in about 2 hours depending on if there is glass and/or metal in it, but trying to get the lighting right for it might take me a couple of days. I mostly do not do outdoor scenes, so this ' you just need one light now ' drives me to distraction. I do studio or indoor type images and would like to use 2 or 3 spotlights from differet directions, and I guess I still have not figured out how to do this quickly and efficiently in Poser. And why can't properly set saturation and contrast at render time?

Although I have been doing photography for over thirty years I have to say I don't really have a problem with Poser lights, horses for courses I guess.  Reality is indeed based upon real lights and I have tried to fall in love with it, what it does it does well but I still have some problems with texture conversion.  Even with the latest edition my characters still have black eyes.  It is not the fault of Reality as I have my character eyes set up for real reflections and I think that is what gives Reality a problem.  So for me personally, Reality is something I have but use rarely as I dislike having to fiddle with the textures and the long render times.

Having said I have no problem with lighting I only use Poser for renders of internal situations.  For anything outside I import my poser character into Vue letting it use the poser materials.   

Someone in the Modo community released a Studio Lighting Kit (SLIK) for Modo, I've never used it, but I believe it does a lot of what you describe. It includes models of all the equipment (see image) so they'll show up in reflections if you want them to. You can also set up all the equipment as you would in a studio, then bake a HDR environment map of the lights, hide them, and use the HDR for illumination.

Although I don't own it, I recall Bagginsbill saying the studio light models included in the Dreamland Car Patio are actually functional as lights, at least with IDL enabled...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?ViewProduct=93079

EDITED because It overwrote the message when I pasted in the link; I had to recompose the message in a text editor and paste it in.  Stoopid Forum!!! >:(

Having IDL in Poser has made the lighting much more realistic.  Try using FleshForge's free RenderRoom, which can result in great illumination with a single point light.

https://sites.google.com/site/fleshforge2/Home/free-stuff/renderroom-prop

Also, here is a good thread on indoor lighting...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2884825

I found four things made lighting in Poser work for me:

1. IDL

2. GC

3. Adjusting the attenuation on lights

4. Changing the display mode for lights to lit wirefame so that I could see them in the preview and place them accordingly.

I still adjust with curves in Photoshop. But then I do that with my photos as well. I've never come across a professional photographer who expects the output directly from his camera to be a finished product. I feel the same about renders.

Edit: I also find it useful to get the lighting right in the scene BEFORE I place a full clothed and textured model in it. Experimenting with lighting in a severely stripped down simplified scene is so very much faster -- and you learn a great deal from doing it.

PS. Just as in the darkroom, the dodge and burn brushes in 2D editors can be your bestest friends.

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 

I agree with a lot of the above, but in general, yes, you need a renderer like Luxrender or Octane that are physically based, that's effectively what you're looking for when you want photographic terminology and behaviour from the renderer.

I have both Octane, and the Reality plugin for Luxrender.  They both have their good and bad points, cause like aRtBee pointed out, Octane is fast but it's costly and depends on specific hardware and memory restrictions in a way that Luxrender and the plugin doesn't.  The only thing I'd like to add to the above is that of the two, Luxrender looks to have the superior output (to me anyway).  Someone mentioned in a thread a while back that Luxrender is considered the standard in physically based rendering, and to be honest, I have to agree with that from my own observations.  It's hard to put a finger on it, and unless you know what you're looking for it's hard to see, but I think Octane and the others out there appear to have a sort weird 'Occlusion' effect going on in a way that Luxrender does not.  I hate the look of Ambent Occlusion, so maybe that's why I pick up on it, but putting render-times aside, I'd definitely say Luxrender is the best of those renderers, looks the most realistic to me.

**I'd like to see more Pose2Lux tutorials. I did look at acrionx's tutorial, but it covers only outdoor lighting and uses Poser's inf lights in his demo. I need a step by step walkthru of a modeling studio type set up. And it would be soooo nice if there were more materials for the free Pose2Lux.
**

Rendering an indoor scenes in Luxrender was easy, at least it seemed to me.  I didn't think anyone needed a tutorial.  My very first render from LuxRender was an indoor scene.  I had a couple of one-sided squares with ambient value set to greater than 1 in the material room and then I set those materials as emitters when exporting.  That's it.  Then those emitters will show up as lights that you can adjust while you are rendering in LuxRender.   For example, all the lights in this render are just materials on the hanger OBJ with ambient value set to greater than 1 in the Poser material room and set as emitters in Pose2Lux.

LuxRender rendering times on my quadcore 64 bit are absolutely tremendously long....

Only as a response to this ... Fredel over at YURdigital has a wonderful IDL lighting set that works wonderful.  When not using BB's EnvSphere for IDL lighting I use Fredel's.  It is much more realistic and less time consuming.

This was done entirely with IDL lighting.

I can't believe that in 2015 we're still talking about long render times.  As many as 8 cpus on one board at tremendous speeds with fountains of memory...

My first problem is that we have to decide what aspects of realism we want.  It should just be "Real" as a default then dial down from there for stylistic purposes, should someone not want "real." If I want to attempt real, I have to have a doctorate in shaders, render settings, plugins, python scripts...I understand some people prefer the esotericism, it gives them something to do, but for me...I just want to be creative and move forward. 

Don't even get me started on the state of affairs with hair.  This continues to be a major WTF? problem again, all the way in the year 2015.  Just think back, those of you who were around, to 1999, 16 years ago, and ask that person using Poser 4 where they'd imagined the state of Poser to be in 2015.  Now ask yourself...are we anywhere near that?

Probably piracy is to blame.  No money; no development other than scraps.  No rethinking the software from the ground up. 

It would take a big chunk of money up front to get something truly new and revolutionary.  Crowd-source? 

 Also, what about technology?  What about an expansion board with nothing but gpus/cpus/memory on it that 3d programs could interface with for faster rendering, be it real time or click and wait?  Maybe a desktop box that connects through USB3 (or greater) (or something) for a compact render farm on the cheap(er)?

Obviously, I have no idea, but damn, I'm willing to have a dialogue, I'm willing to hear real ideas, and I believe I'm about the perfect end-user to say "Yes, this is how it should work" to "No, that is needlessly complicated, how about if..."

Can nothing be done?  2015!  It's been 16 years since Poser 4.   

Keep in mind a few things.  Poser is a character creation program first and foremost.  The user base needs it to remain affordable.  Virtual reality is NOT photography.  The calculations to measure the textures, lights, polygons ... details takes longer and longer the more complex it gets.  I've used Poser since P3.  I've seen the changes and improvements and for what it is ... at the price it is ... IMHO, I find it quite remarkable in the improvements.  We the users can make it do more than "out of the box".  Look at the work bagginsbill has done?  There are ways to export scenes to higher end (in terms of rendering) programs like Vue, Blender and Luxrender.  Photography has it's limitations that 3d lighting can overcome as well ... in some instances.  These are my observations.

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...

Yes, I think I'm imagining a new program altogether.  I know Poser is going to remain poser...it's fully committed at this point.  Never going to change much.

Same with Daz3d.  It is what it is. 

 I resort to lament. 

.  SM should pay Snarly and BB  to incorporate their freebies such as Envirosphere, SceneFixer and Ezskin. 

This is where I start to get off the train.  Why should one need an Envirosphere?  What is an Envirosphere?  What does it do?  It's a clunky Band-Aid as opposed to software just functioning in an intuitive reality, if you get my meaning.  These things are great for Poser, but ultimately not for moving into the 21st century.

Envirosphere is an render environment model; these are models after all.  It lets one render an environment without having to build it, and can serve as a sky model over a modeled scene.

This scene contains the clothed figure, two props; the ground plane (invisible except tor the shadow, which can't be seen from this angle) and the dome, and one infinite light for the Sun...

I'm sorry, I know what it is, I was just illustrating the "n00b" on being exposed to it for the first time. 

That looks pretty good from a render point of view, but from a lighting point of view, you'd obviously want to throw some light on her face. 

Even a camera needs a flash outdoors sometimes. 

The "Golden Hour" applies in 3d, it would seem. 

Actually, there shouldn’t be any shadow on her face, to match the lighting of the background.  However, I moved the Sun a bit to put the shadow there on purpose, as I liked the result better; I paid my Artistic License fees in full... :D

Remember WTB, the more realistic your light becomes the more

you will see major (still unaddressed), shortcomings of the majority of poser figures:

Hair (still transmapped with painted in highlights)

and the very obvious lack of the wet thickness of the lower eyelids

and yes I agree that basically depending on one Shader/mathematics Guru to 

be the major knowledge bridge between an entire user base

and their default rendering and shading system is not a good 

way going forward.

Pray"Bagginsbill" never has an unfortunate encounter with a poorly refrigerated shrimp salad.

No one can deny that poser node based system is powerful

but when you finally learn all the math etc. you realize that accessing that power

will cost you dearly in render times that are unacceptable in the year 2015

for a single image!!

and I wont even broach the subject of animation( creation and rendering) as I have partially migrated to windows and availed myself to modern tools Like RealIllusion's Iclone,

Making posers Vestigial CA tools Moot.

Once again, the debate over photorealism and renders.

If I really, really must have photorealism, for the price of a couple of quality outfits, I can hire a model for a couple of hours, and my Nikon and the model, with her non-transmapped hair, extremely good skin shaders, fully dynamic clothing, and complete soft-body physics, are guaranteed to be photorealistic.

As for render times, I can't speak to Luxrender, but rarely do my print resolution IDL renders take much longer than an hour. I think people are using insane render settings that are totally unnecessary for the pixel quality they need -- or they're trying desperately to eradicate light emitter artifacts with higher and higher settings instead of just using a point light.

True, Poser has serious weaknesses in its renderer, just as most of us have serious weaknesses in our 3d software budgets. But with a bit of experimentation it yields decent results. For anything better, you need to spend considerable time working on the hair and soft-body issues before you even need to think about lighting and renderers. And if you've got a stiff, unrealistic pose, the greatest renderer in the world won't save the image.

...most of us have serious weaknesses in our 3d software budgets...

lol, that's a nice way of putting it.

The other issue, which I keep harping on, is what are you going for: is it "photorealism" as a camera would see it, as your eye would see it, or as your brain interprets what your eye sees?

We all (okay, those of us without vision problems or brain issues) have a photoprocessing and interpretation system running full time which is constantly adjusting on the fly, changing focal distance, changing aperture size, adjusting light levels and colour saturation and so on.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2601364

(Nudity)

So this was an attempt at using Poser as if the lights and camera were the real deal.  I used only good, ole'fashioned spotlights and tweaked around the camera a bit, and turned on DOF.  It turns out, if you read the manual a bit, Poser CAN work like photography.  It only took about an hour to render this out, I don't feel too badly about an hour of time. 

The other issue, which I keep harping on, is what are you going for: is it "photorealism" as a camera would see it, as your eye would see it, or as your brain interprets what your eye sees?

We all (okay, those of us without vision problems or brain issues) have a photoprocessing and interpretation system running full time which is constantly adjusting on the fly, changing focal distance, changing aperture size, adjusting light levels and colour saturation and so on.

Indeed. The popularity of HDR photography has changed the terminology a bit. When I first got into shooting HDRIs, people said my photos looked "like paintings". I assume that's because painters have the option of capturing a higher dynamic range and then painting it with a sort of tone compression because their eyes adjust to compensate for dark shadows and bright highlights to see details that a camera, taking a single shot, would normally lose. OP mentioned bokeh and depth of field, I think. No bokeh in Poser and DOF is quite slow at the best of times. I also do agree that being able to adjust exposure through shutter speed and aperture plus ISO ratings would be fantastic for photographers trying to light a scene, but would it be incomprehensible to many users.

But in any case, we really don't have anything that compares with 3D digital output because it's not really much like traditional photography at all except inasmuch as it's kinda real looking and 2D. But if there's a human in the scene, with rare exceptions, no one who looks closely at a CGI is going to mistake it for a photo. A great many landscapes that spent a week rendering in Vue might well pass though. 

I enjoyed Poser 4 far more than the current Poser. I had a very slow machine back then and it never stopped running with Poser pro 4