Afrodite-Ohki posted at 7:02PM Wed, 07 August 2019 - #4358919

I think iRay in Poser would be a waste, as it's graphics card-specific. And Poser already has (half) included another renderer that's excellent and keeps being further developed.

Never said to replace one with another; that's just crazy-talk. ;)

But thinking deeper, it's not really a question of replacing one render engine with another - the idea is to write plugins that take advantage of other render engines, or better yet, expose enough API so that vendors can write plugins that make using a different render engine painless.

Now obviously some bits aren't going to be easy to automate fully (guessing that shader/material compatibility with the destination engine would be the really big bugaboo), but partial automation should be possible.

And yes about Genesis, but so many people don't seem to understand that - it's authoral tech that gets constantly changed in its many iterations, it would render Poser forever chasing at the back of DS. And spending so many (development) resources just to be able to tag behind. No thanks.

That's another (and quite valid) consideration as well. While there is a lot to be said about including enough import compatibility to attract users of competing product who happen to have a ton of the stuff (you-know-what does a lot of Poser figure compatibility as a matter of course for this very reason), sometimes you just gotta forego it if the cost/is too high or the ROI is too low.