Why is this happening?

Look at all those little dots. What is the deal?

Looks like noise, if it's Poser 12, you need to click on the fx button at the top of the render tab and click on apply denoise. If using Poser 11, you need to up your render quality.

Or, re-render with more overall samples. If those are metallic areas, then maybe add more glossy samples and set glossy bounces to at least 3.

That leads me to another problem I was having. Here is my render settings window:

I don't know what happened; I don't have all the controls I should have. Anybody know what's going on there?

This is Poser Pro 11, by the way.

That's the movie settings. Not sure why those are showing under Render Settings. What happens when you click the Movie Settings tab?

It was the same screen. I just re-installed Poser, and it's working again.

For what it's worth - and I'm definitely no expert - I had a similar problem when rendering a procedural chrome shader I made. The metallic surface always had those annoying dots everywhere. I asked and some suggestions reduced them, but none completely eliminated them. I was told that it has something to do with the number of reflections in the scene. That basically Superfly was trying to do too many calculations and it was getting confused. Not to mention the fact that it also made the chrome surface look very glassy, too. It was really frustrating to me. I made some minor adjustments to my shader and re-rendered in Firefly and the problem was gone. I find anytime I render a scene, if there's metallic surfaces in it, I have much better results with Firefly. For cloth or skin surfaces, I like Superfly because of the depth of color it provides. Not really a solution for you problem, but just wanted to let you know someone else has had the same issue.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I went back to Firefly, and I'm satisfied.

Have just started exploring Superfly and am getting these dots in every render. Keep trying to, what I think is, up the quality and they just turn into smaller dots. Using Poser 11 and firefly works fine but am liking some of the way materials come out with Superfly. Just not the dots. Is there some base threshold to have the settings at to avoid this? Foliage and landscape renders.

What are your lights and are you using an environment sphere?

I have one spotlight One diffuse IBL One infinite light and yes an environment sphere using the same HDRI image as the diffuse IBL

With envirosphere with hdri on it you don't need other lights, really because it will light the scene. Try rendering without any lights, the add back a single infinite sun and try that way.

I will try that, thank you for your suggestion.

Was still getting the noise. Was upping everything in the render settings but the pixel samples box at the top. Missed that one. Upped it and the noise is gone, but the render takes longer.

The adaptive sampling in Poser 12 will be your friend to reduce render times and it also has a good de-noise to get rid of the sparklies too.

I find that with 45-50 pixel samples with no branched path tracing I can produce good quality renders, but it does take time.

Regarding adaptive sampling, you may find this article useful: https://www.posersoftware.com/article/505/whats-new-in-poser-12-how-to-use-adaptive-sampling-and-a-software-update

Those little bright dots are fireflies. If you were to let your image render out past 10,000 samples those little dots would all add up to a highlight in your image. They are coming from very bright, very small lights or very bright, very small bright spots in your HDRI, or mistakes in your shaders that are reflecting light back out as these hot-spots. You can also get the effect if you take a ball and crank up it's ambience and place it in a prop like a bowl where the inside edges of the bowl have to diffuse and reflect the light.

What can you do?

1. use an HDRI with a lower dynamic range. This will make all the shadows and highlights soft and get rid of the fireflies.
2. make sure you have clamping set. Start around default 10 if this is already set then look elsewhere to get rid of the fireflies.
3. Use the "BACKGROUND" to light your scene with your HDRI instead of a dome or sphere. The background lighting works with much less noise and errors than using an ambient dome. The added benefit is that the background will also cast proper highlights and shadows.
4. fix your shaders: use proper PBR legal shaders that wont bork your scene. If you are running Poser 11 use my super shader that is free right here at Renderosity. It does proper metals and even has all the correct colors for the metal you want. If you are running Poser 12 then use the Principled BSDF node for metals that wont freak out your scene. examples of using the background as a light source.

here is one using my shader for the metallic catsuit.

If you're using Poser 11 there are some things you can do to tone down the noise in your renders."Filter Glossy, Clamp Direct and Clamp Indirect". Turn up the filter and turn down the clamp. If you turn clamp down too far (less than 1) it will darken the whole scene.

These settings aren't as effective as adaptive sampling and OiDN in P12 but the can help a lot.

I thought HDRI images always had to be used on a sphere. Nice to know they don't.

Thank you so much for all the suggestions i will be trying these out.

I came across a document that suggested a simple scene set-up to test fireflies and render settings.

Impact of changing roughness (randomness of sample ray direction I assume)

Impact of changing number of samples (Poser default render settings -