The 3D/CGprofessionals that actually matter, are not using Poser/Daz studio or Iclone.

Actually one area of the CG industry makes heavy use of DS, namely 'adventure games.' Well they call them adventure games but it's mostly a basic mystery or adventure plot with some casual puzzle solving and things like finding hidden objects and so on. There's lots of static backgrounds with some lightly animated characters or props. There's dozens of them released every month and they almost invariably use DS, or to put it more accurately they use DS renders of DAZ content with occasional postwork. Anyone whose played one of these 'games' will easily spot the stuff they're using...

Now this was a market that Poser could have seriously aimed for, and in fact once upon a time it did see healthy use in this industry. But once the DAZ split happened and all the best vendors making the best content flocked to DS, so did the industry. To get them back would require serious investment into Poser content by someone with deep pockets but so far all the owners seem to want to crowdfund it's content. Which doesn't really inspire much confidence if you're a business looking for pipeline tools.

Main issue with doing this sort of thing in Poser is that it doesn't have the rigs to do it. This is what a student level (but fully capable) rig looks like in Maya, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3YKuj6qjAM&feature=emb_logo

Now try doing some of that in Poser with the rigs you have in various figures. The issues will become self evident to you.

Few of things I can suggest:

1. If you use the girl in the render as reference, then the texture is way too large. I don't mean the blocks but the noise/distortion in the concrete is too large.

2. Some details you can add: Graffiti, oil/piss stains, moss/fungus growing around the seams, splotches of old paint, pasted flyers and old 'shadows' from flyers... You may also want to have some of the blocks sticking slightly outwards.

3. The normals of your wall mesh seem messed up, which is why you're getting that balloon like look. Make sure the normals of each face are hardened. I dunno how to do this in C4D though, sorry.

Are pojnt/spot lights no longer infinitely small light sources in superfly ? Or do you mean that they do the same fake shadow blur as in firefly ?

Note that area lights are good for soft lighting because they blur shadows in a realistic manner, with blurring dependent on geometry of the light (plane, sphere etc) and distance, just like with real lights. Do point/spot lights work this way as well ?

For soft lighting like that use area lights instead which are specifically designed for soft shadows/lighting like that, while still being direct lights.

As for mesh lights, I thought cycles had bi-directional path tracing now, did they not implement it into superfly or is it not present in cycles either ?

Reading this thread i'm still not sure whether or not superfly uses multiple cards for rendering or not. If I have 2xTitanX and 1x980Ti, will it use all three of them for rendering simultaneously ? Anyone have a definitive answer ?

Is your display color calibrated properly ? Cause all your renders have very pink colored sclera (the white part)

Since you have superfly use that instead. Fixing these in firefly is not worth the time/effort it would take (and they still may not get fixed)

GPU rendering in superfly is... odd to say the least. Personally I do get better performance on my home GPU (like 2x-3x) but that's mainly cause i've got an oldish CPU and a very powerful GPU (980Ti) I imagine if I had a modern CPU and something like a 970 or lower, the results would be more like what you're getting. And that's really not good IMO. I use GPU rendering in my day job and most of the time it is 10x-20x faster then CPU rendering, that's the main reason we chose it for our projects. We could really use that kind of performance in superfly.

Perhaps it's just a case of superfly/cycles not being mature enough in this department as yet ?

Agreed ! That's a really nice render, easily comparable to something you'd get out of a much higher end app. Really wish you'd post some more details about your settings, materials etc...

This is the most believable lighting for this kind of space, IMO. An area light looks nice and is easy to set up, but easy isn't best - it's just easy.

You can't really call it believable if it has all those hard shadows everywhere.

Definitely better. I would also suggest not using Poser figures/textures to tune your shader. Instead get something like the free Emily and use that:

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/DigitalEmily/

That will help reduce/eliminate any effect low quality poser textures and mesh may be having on your results. Later you can fine tune for poser content.

Waaay too much SSS

About speed, you don't really need fast renders in the poserverse cause typically people only render stills and are willing to wait overnight for them. Much more important is ease of use and compatibility and iRay is amazing in this regard. However 'evil' they may or may not be, DAZ have definitely done a lot of good work towards making iRay a real alternative to 3delight. SM could def. learn a thing or two from them in this. And note that as long as you have a decent current gen gaming card (970, 980, 980ti etc) iRay can be pretty fast as well.

That sounds like a power/PSU problem. USB drives get all their power from the USB port and power consumption spikes sharply when rendering so it is popssible that your PSU is unable to provide enough power to drive everything. You haven't listed your PSU brand, but is it from a reputable company like Corsair, Seasonic etc ?