Hello, everyone.

The reason I'm here on this rare occassion is because I need to make a decision. A costly decision. I feel however, that it may be worth the investment so before I go through with it. I just need some advice. 

Well, right now I've been using Poser Pro 2012 for a good while. It's nice to have all its new features that I didn't have with Poser 7 which I was using for at least 3 years before the switch to Pro 2012. At any rate, firefly is not that bad of a rendering engine. I've seen a few people render in poser Pro 2012 with exceptional results. I was never quite sure if they were using IBL or just regular lights like spot lights, point light, etc. 

Still I understand that lights is what can make or break an art piece. I was wondering however, if Lux would be a much better choice to go with. Does it calculate lighting and shadows better than firefly? How well does it handle lights compared to firefly?

My problem with getting good quality renders in Poser has a lot to do with not knowing where the lights should be, or how they should be edited in the material room to improve the quality. I've tried the whole environmentsphere trick and that didn't really do much. Sometimes I'm trying to figure out if a light source should be closer to a figure, or further away from them for quality. There have been few occassions where the figures will render nicely, but the environment would look dull or shadows had a splooch effect. Some shadows looked too harsh to even be believable. So I'd try to just reduce shadows from 1000 down to 500 or sometimes 600.

Most of my life as a poser user. I would just play around with lights until I would get the results. These days I can't really afford to waste the time guessing. So I put up an image I did with Sub surface turned on and Indirect lighting. It looks okay, but still not as good as I'd like it to be. I seen some vids of Lux in action, some with Octane too. Both do a fine job of making renders look great. And most of the artists have claimed they didn't even do any post working in Photoshop to improve the lighting either. However, anyone that uses firefly has been guilty of fine tuning the lights professionally in Photoshop for better quality. One fine example is this gentlemen right here who I've spoke to on DA about his work. 

http://cyberdynestudio4.deviantart.com/art/Reversal-392145786

I have for ages been asking him how did he get his art to have such a strong Photo-real look to it. And when he told me that he did it in Poser Pro 2012. I was shocked...I was never able to get my renders to come anywhere close to that in Poser Pro 2012 no matter what I did. But he was always nice about it going into detail. He does a little post work. Not sure if he explained that his post working was done on the lighting or just fixing small things like poke throughs, etc..Which can be done with the Morph tool if your careful with using it.

So I always wanted to know if I should go with Lux for better quality or is there any technique I could be learning or should know about to get the most power out of Firefly's engine. I've seen some great work done with firefly, so I know it can do justice if one could just understand what type of lights too use, whether or not I should make use of gamma correction in Poser Poser, etc. Again I know a guy that uses Octane and doesn't post work anything. But setting up the lights in Octane still looks a little tricky judging from what I've seen on Youtube. So I'm assuming that's the pay off of getting high quality art even though it's nowhere near as complex as trying to do it in Maya or XSI.