When I render my scenes in Poser, they look fine. But it takes a very long time to do it. But when I render the same scene in Poser (with Poser lights and all) the scene is way too bright. I adjusted the lights, but the textures do not look right. The skin looks dull and plasticky in Carrara but not in Poser. The Carrara render is like 100X faster though.

So what can I do to my Carrara scene to make it look like the Poser render?

After adjusting the lights you need to fix the textures in the texture room.
To get an idea of how to make these textures look right, try rendering the same figure from the carrara browser. V4 for example, is available in Carrara, ready to render. Compare the texture settings to what appear on V4 from your Poser import. If you adjust your Poser import to similar settings, it will look pretty good.
There are some tutorials on this over at DAZ and Carrara lounge.

Though no expert, I've alway used Carrara lights and not the imported lights in carrara. If my bump maps or specularity are to high, they are easily adjusted in the texture room. In addition I do use global illumination and/or HDRI  often in my renders. Carrara, for me, allows me much more control over lighting than poser and, yes, the speed is amazing, especially when your rendering animation.

Quote - After adjusting the lights you need to fix the textures in the texture room.
To get an idea of how to make these textures look right, try rendering the same figure from the carrara browser. V4 for example, is available in Carrara, ready to render. Compare the texture settings to what appear on V4 from your Poser import. If you adjust your Poser import to similar settings, it will look pretty good.
There are some tutorials on this over at DAZ and Carrara lounge.

Ok, thanks for the tips. I've done several Google searches for tutorials but didn't see anythign relevant. Do you mean the Carrara forums at Daz is where the tutorials are? I don't mean to sound lazy, but can you direct me to the link b/c I'm not entirely sure where they are.

 
http://www.daz3d.com/i/tutorial/tutorial?id=2200&_m=d 
is one such tutorial. Some tutorials are in the DAZ tutorials sections. Others are linked to in the carrara section of the DAZ forum.

The above is a good basic shader adjustment tutorial.  You will note that other objects (particularly fabrics) frequently come into Carrara with a highlight which renders them plastic looking.  Set highlight to none and fabrics immediately look much more lifelike (less reflective).  If you have something which needs a small amount of highlight don't set it to none, just adjust the color from white to a very dark grey (play with it until you like the effect).

Klebnor

I've also noticed that Poser imported materials into Carrara very often have the bumps set way too high (sometimes around 300%!).  So, this is another area to look at when importing over from Poser.

Absolutely right!  In fact, I have seen many dial up to 500%, and they look ridiculous.

Carrara could benefit from a global bump adjust which would set all bumps to a certain number, of give the option to adjust all by an input percentage (say 10%).  This would allow one to to a global adjustment, and then go back and do individual adjustments as necessary.

Klebnor

if the carrara renderer uses gamma correction, then the scene with poser lites may look washed out or too bright, because one of the poser developers mentioned that poser users sometimes forget to   gamma-correct their renders and/or textures.  gamma-correcting the textures in poser probably wouldn't translate into anything useable in carrara, due to the difference in shader nodes.

GC must be turned on, and can be set.  It is effective.

There is no reason to leave the Poser lights in a scene in Carrara.  The Carrara lights allow much more tuning and realism - one should get used to stripping out the Poser lights and starting from scratch.

One hint it took me a while to realize - when you spend time developing excellent lighting for a scene you can easily group the lighting, then place the group in a master group with your scene objects.  This master group can then be saved as an object in the Carrara browser.  When you want to use it again, you can just pull it out of the browser and there it is - fixed shaders, lights and all.

Klebnor

one other tip for poser users: there's something called fresnel's law (or similar) where
diffuse + specular + transparency + reflection + refraction = 1.0
anything greater than 1.0 in poser, and it will appear to glow when imported into carrara.
this was a much worse problem in the days before poser had a standard shader tree setup.

For lighting (fake GI) in Carrara, the free light dome from Tim Payne that is very easy to use can be found at:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/30481/3D-Model/Light-Dome-presets-for-Carrara-6

The light dome is much faster and easier on resouces than true GI, and gives what I think are good results (see my attempt with it at the link below).
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1816396&member
Poser materials almost always need to be adjusted in Carrara, and usually need to be "tuned" to the lights you are using.

A rule of thumb in regards to 3D apps in general is that a shader/material setup for one application will never look the same in another application. (And this is pretty true for all 3D apps, with the possible exception of those that have a common plugin-style render engine.) I believe it applies in this case.

So make note that the materials for models/figures imported into Carrara will always look funky in Carrara, with the exception of models where shaders/materials have specifically been setup and made for use in Carrara. Until you get a good base collection of shaders together and saved to your library, re-doing shaders is a necessary evil. Also with rendering, adjustments are part of the process (if not one thing, it's another) - I'd suggest to get used to it.

Hi,
the 500% bump setting should be fixed in Carrara 7.2, it was really annoying in 7.1.
I imported the same scene (Stonemason mediterranean) into 7.1 and 7.2 and the
results look very different.

With GC, the issue is that Carrara does not apply inverse GC to textures like Poser,
so you have to manually adjust all your textures in order to avoid double GC, which
makes the images look too bright and washed out.

Best regards,
   Michael