SnowSultan - "I'll admit that I'm surprised that there appears to be so little difference in quality between the P4 renderer and Firefly in your everyday "normal" Poser render"

The classic poser usage is a fairly tight image of a model with a either a fairly non-demanding texture or one that is photo based; those textures usually look good under a fairly narrow range of lighting conditions.

In other words... Poser renders as we commonly see them are simply not very complicated. 99% of the "render" quality is built directly into the texture... and that is why those textures can look so good with fairly little calculation and fail so miserably under any circumstance outside their designed for settings.

For instance, many Poser4 textures have highlights and shine built directly into the texture itself to compensate for the shortfalls of the render engine; as soon as you take those textures into another lighting condition it looks horrible. It is this trick that has allowed Poser to rival much more expensive systems, if you're careful and stay inside the limitations. it also pretty much guarantees that a much more powerful render engine won't help too much with those images.

The improvements we see in Poser5 will come in two specific forms:

• We will see a dramatic increase in the quality of the renders for full "scenes". Though I myself would never dream of building a scene in Poser under most circumstances I know a lot of people do - and the quality has always suffered anytime the renderer was left on it's own to make things look real as opposed to just rendering a photographic texture.
• The textures designed for Poser5 will look better under a wider variety of lighting and camera settings. The highlights no longer have to be built in. Many smaller shadows no longer have to be faked onto the texture (a displacement map will allow them to actually render) and multiple layers of enhancements are possible.

BTW - you have a folder on my machine too... so it's pretty common :)

williamsheil  - "The problem I and some others have with Firefly is that despite its alleged pedigree, it patently falls a long way short of REYES in terms of speed, quality and resource usage and far behind the quality of even relatively simple to implement (but slow) 'brute-force' ray tracing solutions."

While I agree that FF is not the top rendering system around, i have yet to see any objective comparison of it's supposed lack of quality. Can you point me at a comparison of the engine and another REYES like engine with substantially similar scenes and shaders so I can see what the problem is for myself?