I seem to remember someone asserting this feature in poser5 isnt there a free open source version of renderman?? and has any poser 5 user tried to implement this???

Kupa originally made this statement, but later corrected it. The confusion was that a lot of people equate "Renderman" with the Reyes type subdividing polygon technology used in Pixar's PRMan renderer. What Steve intended to say was that Firefly was to be based on this technology. Renderman Compliance (which is defined by Pixar) actually defines the capabilities of and interface to a rendering engine, not the technology used, and would need to be verified by Pixar through a number of tests before the compliance certificate was awarded. There are a number of renders which are compliant with this standard, scanline engines like PRMan itself of course, but also raytracers such as BMRT. On the whole though, compliance only makes sense for stand alone renderers, for application embedded renderers, such as Firefly compliance would be a waste of effort. Bill

Thank for the explaination :-)

Also, though I've never tried it myself, P4 and P5 supposedly can export RIB files, which is the format used by PRMan and the open source BMRT. In fact, you might want to search the forum and the free stuff, as I seem to remember someone working on a utility dealing with this.

You can indeed export Poser RIB files which can be rendered in BMRT. I believe 2.5 was the last version of BMRT available as freeware but there are acouple of other freeware Renderman type renderers available. As I recall, you have to do a search and replace on the RIB file to change the line endings to the Unix style BMRT expecta and possibly change the textures to TIF. Don't know of a utility for RIBs, but there is one to use PZ3s with POVRay.