One nice alternative to crazybump is AwesomeBump:

https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump

It's open source, GPU based (so it's fast) supports PBR and extracts all major maps with lots of control over the result. The only thing it doesn't do is high rez/low rez detail extraction but you can use xNormal for that.

Those who post in Fora are the rounding error in the number of users.....

Does that mean that DAZ (which have a pretty active forum) have an enormous number of users or that SM have a dwindling amount ? I also wonder how true this old saw is these days when everyone seems to be online 24/7...

Perhaps you could explain a bit more about what you're trying to do ? Ambient is useful in a very narrow range of applications, most of them to do with self illuminated objects and indirect lighting. It is not something you want to change in regular materials in a scene.

Cool idea ! One useful feature I can think of would be some kind of flowcharting functions so you can organize your story flow with perhaps optional conversion from the flowchart to a basic layout. Then the user could add stuff to the layout like images and audio, edit the hotspots the way they want and so on.

nVIDIA is gearing up to relase their new monster Titan-X 12GB so it's possible that prices on their old stuff will go down. Maybe wait a bit and see what happens ?

For rendering ? It will run but you wont be seeing amazing performance or be able to handle large scenes. For that you want something like a 970GTX.

To change colors/textures you would assign unique IDs to each instance and then use those to select from different textures/colors. For more variety, you could also create a small number of variations with different clothing/pose/prop etc and then instance the variations. Finally you can instance animated models with randomly offset time and optional AI behavior so that you can create eg a walking crowd or a battlefield.

They look the same because they are basically the same in terms of the kind of rendering they do. Some focus on performance, some on more features but the root unbiased rendering approach is the same in all of them. And of course the bottleneck in all this is steadily shifting from the rendering itself to the quality of content being rendered...

Yeah it's pretty nifty, they seem seriously motivated in making it a full alternative to 3delight.

I can understand someone who already uses both Poser and DS might want to try it but what are the other options open to Poser users that only use Poser and don't want to go down the Daz route?

Good news is that there is more choice in renderers these days then ever before. There's VRay, Arnold, Redshift, Octane, Thea, Indigo, moskito, Maxwell, Cycles off the top of my head as well as various old workhorses like mentalray, finalRender, PRMan, 3delight, Vue...

The bad news is that only a few of them offer any kind of serious support for Poser or are affordable. There's lux of course which is free and has good support via Reality but is painfully slow. There's Octane which is faster but isn't exactly cheap. Also good old C4D + interposer but that's even more expensive... Compared to those, iRay does seem like a 'best of all worlds' renderer IMO.

It seems to me that complex node setups are almost always a result of trying to hack around some limitation of firefly. The ideal material setup for the majority of stuff people render with poser (skin, cloth, hair, metal etc with textures and alpha) are probably not very complex. If you created a convertor that basically limited itself to those common materials but did them really well, would that be possible/worthwhile ?

But then you still have to learn all the material settings which are different from the dials used for the regular gloss/spec model

I was thinking more along the lines of something like reality that translates materials/settings in an intelligent way.

iRay itself does seem to support moblur in MAX at least. Perhaps it's just not implemented inside DS as yet (or they disabled it for some reason ?) Here's the MAX manual on it:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2015/ENU/?guid=GUID-25648CF2-A60F-450F-8880-8ADCD2EB13FF

The pollution consists of DAZ threads in a POSER FORUM.

And again i'm politely asking you to leave if you don't like this thread. Report it to the mods if you must.

Back on topic, if DAZ keep this thing free then maybe this could become a nice option for rendering Poser scenes as well ? lux is slow and octane is expensive and high end renderers don't have much support for poser... Could scripts be written to allow scene setup in Poser and rendering in DS/iRay ?

Well then the best thing to do would be to limit yourself to your Glitterati3D-approved(tm) threads and not pollute the threads of others...

And this pertains to a Poser forum how?

Right now the first page of this forums has threads about jokes of the day, a posing doll, an announcement about a con appearance, and a thread about the Indian film industry.. Are you seriously saying that this is more OT then that ?

I guess maybe some folks are wondering if Poser will have the same or something similar come next version?

Exactly. Personally I have zero interest in what posing tool anyone uses. I just think it is interesting that DAZ, which already had a decent renderer in 3delight are adding GPU rendering. If SM decide to compete by doing the same for Poser it would be the single most exciting development in Poser since forever.