Get Poser talking to one of the generative AIs, adding another way to render. Perhaps a PostFX connector to automatically pass the finished render's i) depth map, ii) real-time Comic Book line-art, and iii) the original render over to an Generative AI UI's (e.g. InvokeAI) Controlnet.  It's all Python, so should theoretically be possible?

Mind, you... there's also the rapidly developing AI and 360° VR, which might offer a sort of 'super MojoWorld' in due course - if not quite on the same 'planetary' scale. Around the corner is something called Skybox AI (currently in beta) which will soon... "generate complete 360° game environments from text prompts and/or sketches". The demo videos on YouTube suggest it will do (somewhat toony) space-art type 360° VR scenes with atmospheric depth-fogging...

Yes, MojoWorld is still fun to use for no-trees planetscapes and I believe the final 3.1.1. Pro can now be found at the Internet Archive. The problem is the rendering speed, as it was never able to take advantage of modern methods. I think there's a discussion thread on this, on the Renderosity MojoWorld Forum. An install of Poser 6 (can only be 6) is needed to get Poser .PZ3 files into a MojoWorld planetscape. It's sometimes amusing to see various technical papers from 3D academics today, when you realise that what they're trying to re-create is basically... MojoWorld. Such a pity it was never developed to have fast rendering.

But I'd still look at the latest Vue, if it can be run on your OS (I assume the new PC has Windows 11 on it), and if you can bear a subscription. Even a year would enable you to see if it's for you, or if you need to go to Terragen, Gaea or to a real-time engine.

Finally, I'd note that Poser 13 uses the latest Blender Cycles engine (re-branded in Poser as Superfly), so may be an easier option to use than spending years learning Blender just to use Cycles rendering. I guess DAZ Studio many even be an option these days, as it has a lot of (costly) outdoor scenes, terrains and vegetation available. But I guess that with either you'll lack a certain something in terms of Vue's lush atmospheres and vast distances.

I see that Vue Infinite 9.5 was released back in summer 2011. Vue has come a very long way since then (but can still read and load Poser files). I'd definitely install a trial of the latest Vue and see if it might be worth it. Otherwise you would have to junk a lot of skills, knowledge, and perhaps also Python scripts. Also, I believe the subscription gives you access to E-on's PlantFactory. I seem to remember that that they will also unlock your purchased Cornucopia stuff (though I may be wrong on that, or out of date).

No Windows 7 though. The target for Windows 7 would be Vue 2021.1 R6.1. I'm not sure they'd let you subscribe to that though.

Terragen is still around and had a lot of effort put into clouds a few years ago. But probably not as easy as the 'stylised but realistic' Vue atmospheric system and one-click presets.

Gaea has been mentioned above, and I think it had a major update recently too?

There's also various real-time software such as World Creator (or is it World Machine? I can never remember the difference), Instant Terra etc and after that you're into the real-time proper game-engines such as Unreal, Unity, some 2D/3D artists still us that old (Half Life?) engine whose name I can't recall (Source Engine?) and do nice things with it. I even see people still making pleasing planetscapes on DeviantArt with MojoWorld!

Tutorial.

Tested and working, with the above scripts. Use V4.2 and not a plain V4.

I found a "G8F to V4/A4 Pose Transfer" freebie on Rendo. So it looks like, in Daz Studio:

i) the free "V3/A3/GV3 Pose Transfer to G8F" script for Daz

ii) then the free "G8F to V4/A4 Pose Transfer" script to a V4.

Then save out the V4 pose for final tweaking and use in Poser. It might also be possible to combine chunks of the script(s) code, and thus go direct from V3 to V4.

The only thing I know of for V3/M3 is the free "V3/A3/GV3 Pose Transfer to G8F" script for Daz (posted on the forums as a ZIP). Might it be possible to hack that, to send the pose to V4 instead of G8?

Glad to be of help. I should add that anyone wanting to learn to make / rig their own simple base figure should probably get 'Poser Figure Creation with Darkseal' which is on the Daz Store, and currently '80% off' at $6.

marcwhosis - no, it's a legit offer of Poser 12. Take a look at their site. 

Just to add... that a valid Poser 12 serial can be had for $48 from graphixly .com and (whatever the specs say) it will run on Windows 8.x. If you'r doing photoreal rather than line-art / comic-book / sketch, then it will be a big time saver and would probably pay for itself in terms of electricity costs to run the graphics-card over a year. That's assuming you also have a fast graphics card.

As you mention Visual Studio Code, ADP's Fake_poser3a.py may be a useful assistant. His site/page appears to have been unavailable for some months, and the Wayback Machine hasn't saved his .ZIP files (though some of the code insets still display). But here is his Fake_poser3a.py (latest version) for use with Visual Studio Code etc. I've added an expanded header.

In Poser you can output a masked (aka 'cutout') PNG which has 'invisible' pixels for the background. it's then just a question of dropping these over a backdrop in a layered Photoshop file. As of Poser 12, "SuperFly now does background transparency" and also "shadow catching".

If you are making quick Preview renders (e.g. for a comic) then have the Shadow Map size on lights up to at least 1024 (default is 512), if not 2048.  This will improve shadow quality. Regrettably it seems there's no way for a Python script to tweak these dials up with a single click. There's no hook that a script can hang onto to change "Preview Shadow Maps Size" in Poser. They have to be increased by hand. I assume that's still the case in Poser 13.

There is however a Poser script, “Change Shadow Intensity of Selected Lights”, if they are too black. There are also "Scene shadow blurring scripts for Poser", which in one click has the lights use softer ray-traced shadows, rather than the default depth-map shadows. Check out the Poser-made comics of Brian Haberlin (Sonata etc) to see how he handles shadows from Poser figures.

There's also a "render each figure/prop separately" script than can be made to work in Poser 11 and probably 12 and 13. Theoretically you could then select / fill the rendered figure shape with black, skew and distort and blur it in Photoshop, and call it 'the shadow'. I think there are also several 'long shadow' actions in Photoshop that do something similar, having a PNG cutout cast a long shadow of the cutout's shape. The advantage here is that these can be somewhat adjustable in its placement behind the character. I think that Richard Rosenman has a free one, but I could be wrong. It might be paid.

Greenscreen would though be needed to make a 2D 'fish in a bottle' Photoshop layer set made of three renders. The front and back of the bottle, and the fish (or whatever you want... octopus, pickled gnome) in the middle. In which case you slide a bright green square into the centre of the bottle, and use Primatte in Photoshop to remove the greenscreen. You'd do this if you wanted to make a kit showing commonly repeating jars and bottles, and you didn't want to have to render each and every one.

A bit more info about WalkThisWay, from a 2007 forum comment by Cage...

"It looks like Ockham's WalkThisWay.py, version 1, suffered from these same memory problems. He suggests that the problem is a Poser memory leak, specifically with Poser 5. WalkThisWay2 avoid the problem using heavy restructuring which seems to remove most of the collision or positioning comparison in WTW1. So apparently no real solution was found for the problem, but it may be that this shows that the problem is indeed Poser."

The readme file in the free 'Poser 12 helper scripts and perma-palette' pack (on ShareCG) shows you, with a sample, how to get a custom perma-palette that stays fixed from session to session.