Snapshots! Or, Sunlight in Iray

 

So here's the challenge: how do you pour enough light into a scene to simulate full sunlight? And it turns out to be a balance between a skylight set dead overhead (or offset at an angle, if you want more of an afternoon or morning look about the shadows), and an HDRI image set as the Environment, or IBL light. Soooo, I went to HDRI Haven (Google it) and picked an image that looked like it would generate the kind of lighting I wanted, and then just cranked up the settings, higher and higher, in the Environment Pane, until I had it reasonably close -- like an overcast day. Then you make a distant light (a spotlight would have worked just as well), put it high overhead, adjust it to about 500k lumens, turn on shadows. Result -- well, check it out. I did two different virtual exposures on the shot, to be sure...

With a bit of work in the Tone Mapping Pane I was easily able to either burn out the highlights and brighten the subject, or else balance the shot for "outside," and let the subject be darker, which is exactly what you'd get if you were there in person, and taking photos. (The Tone Mapping pane gives you access to ISO, Vignetting, Gamma and Saturation, all of which I use a lot before doing the final render. And of course, with the DOF turned on you get that extra level of realism. This worked out perfectly --woohoo! (The set is The Gate, by DM; the model is Dae for G8 Male; the hair is Varun Hair for G8; and incidentally, the same hairstyle works on the G8 Female. I was just about to do a render using this when Studio announced that it had to "update Genesis 8 Starter Essentials," and launched into a process that is going to take up to sixty hours. This effectively ties up my system, soo... Grr.)

Speaking of hair -- I was going through old renders from my previous foray into Iray and G8, and I stumbled over this. It's Dae again ... but he's wearing a Michael 4 hairstyle, and it looks good on him. This is Neftis's Mon Chevalier Hair for M4. You just load it, jog it into place, parent it, and then tweak it in the Surfaces Pane to make it Iray compatible. It looks great on G8. 

That's it for me, for the moment. The computer is slogging slowly through the process. After several hours it's up to a whole, whopping 13%. Oooh, ahh. Patience, Grasshopper. 

Let snoozing dragons lie...

Having finished the edit on the book yesterday, today has been about learning all the stuff that's been sitting there, waiting for me since before Christmas. I have Studio, Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher and the new Word open, and am using a new keyboard that's tying my fingers in knots! I have NOT run back to my old programs, not even once (not that I wasn't tempted!) ... so here's today's effort. Yep, we're into dragons, and Iray at last. Walking home through the meadow, you come upon a dragon who's juuust settling in to snooze for the evening -- big lizard, you understand; sun's going down. So steal by softly, and maybe he'll just take a sniff at you...

This is the Millennium Dragon 2, snoozing in Merlin's Wild Borders, with DOF on, Iray lights, and a sky designed in Terragen. Took about 30 minutes to render at high quality, after about 50 test renders at speedy settings. I learned a lot ... especially that studio 4 is not really "friendly" toward a lot of the older models; and that you can be as clever as you like with Iray lights and progressive rendering, and if you're not using Iray *materials* you'll end up with a storybook illustration, not photographic quality. So let's call it a storybook: I like it!

 

In at the deep end! First render off the new computer

 

Okay ... the oars are at least dipping into the water LOL! First render off the new computer, first glimmering of mastery over this version of Studio. The challenge was to FIND everything, which is far from easy, as yet. Then to configure everything (ack). Then to get the DOF figured out. No problem there. Am still faffing on with the lighting, but I'm about halfway through the process. Don't get too excited yet: almost everything you see here is a preset, just arranged and configured.

The only real fly in the ointment today was trying to get Affinity Photo to play nice, and it refused; and finding out that my Wacom Bamboo will need to be re-re-reconfigured for the new computer; as it stands, it just doesn't work, and/or is pure torture.

So ... first render. The Genesis 8 "Rex" character, plus shirt, plus hair, plus a shader on the shirt, and a necklace; add a set, add a backdrop, suitably blurred to match the DOF; add lights. Render --

Results? This hairstyle never would render on my old computer. The GPU "choked" before it was finished, at about the two hour mark. This was the work of about four minutes flat, rendered at 2000 pixels wide, and middle-high quality. Smiling there! 

I needed to paint part of the shirt for "poke through" that couldn't be fixed prior to rendering, and if I'd been able to do it in Affinity Photo, I'd have been delighted with today. Nope. Had to start up the old system, and used Photoshop as a tide-over. These problems will be addressed tomorrow, when I'm not so tired!

All in all, I'm quite happy with this as a first experiment. Lots and LOTS of problems to iron out, but now we're on our way! 

Wide black wings and shiny new leathers ... serendipity!

Serendipity struck last night. I was physically crawling around under the desk, playing tag with the dust bunnies while I jiggled cables, trying to get my internet connection back -- which I did. To test it, I started up my browser (I use Opera) and loaded something ... and saw that DAZ was having one of their rolling sales, with massive discounts. So --

The Morningstar Wings for G8 ... the Huntsman leathers, also for G8. I also got another costume, Crimson Seas, which is a buccaneer outfit with really neat "mix and match" sections, and a set of tattoos, which obviously you can't see when Genesis 8 is wearing the costume, so we'll play with those next. The savings were immense, being able to pounce on the sale right then and there...

The only downside to the Morningstar Wings is that they take a lot of rendering; predictably, my system won't finish them properly, so it's the same story as the satin shaders: you paint a lot in Photoshop after the fact, even though the render cooked for six hours overnight. But the costume rendered brilliantly, and quickly, so we'll be using that, and parts of it, often...

Playing in Iray, I went back to the low-poly set and high-poly figure concept for a second take:

This was a fairly manageable render, to three hours -- with the DOF turned on and the virtual camera aperture set to a quite small size to get a hint of that "bokeh lens" type effect. I'm not a fan of this hairdo, which was a freebie with Studio's starter pack --

-- I think it's a Genesis 2 hairdo, but at least it renders up well, if you jiggle the surface settings somewhat. Right out of the box, it looks ... plastic. Kill some of the gloss, crank up the bump strength and change the base color to a dark brown instead of flat black, and it looks credible. (It just also looks like something you'd see on the Three Stooges!) It's called Duke's Hair, and I guess it's supposed to look like Duke William of Normandy's coiffure ... the old "pudding basin cut" which was so common right up to the time of Richard III. (So-called because, so it is said, the barber put a pudding basin on your head and cut around it. Huh.) 

Anyway -- Matias for G8 with Duke's hair, all high-poly stuff ... sitting in DM's The Gate, a low-poly set. And it finishes rendering properly, so this obviously works. The Morningstar Wings are a very high-poly prop, added to a high-poly figure, and I don't think they'd finish rendering on my computer, supposing I left it rendering till the day Mephistopheles skated to work!

Photoshop to the rescue, right? Will be playing with the other new goodies later today ... might even be able to post a second time before lights out. As I said -- Serendipity, late last night!

Michael 8 joins the party -- first look, in Iray

Michael 8 himself ... first look, as rendered by moi. Fairly nice renders, actually, and it's quite a nice skinmap, if very pale -- but I'm not sure I'm a tremendous fan of that body shape! It's a bit "eighteen years old next birthday." We'll be adjusting this with the body morphs ... oh, tomorrow, I expect!

In fact, DAZ was having one of their crazy store-wide sales today. I couldn't resist getting the Michael 4 Pro Bundle, which is thirteen items rolled into one (including the dangly bits for Genesis 8, ahem!). The usual price is about A$210, and I got it this morning for about A$80, which is a colossal saving. Couldn't not make the investment. The pack contains --

The M8 base figure, two other skinmaps (characters), two hair props of varying value, two packs of poses, five costumes, and the aforementioned "male anatomical elements," or whatever they delicately term the dangly bits these days. [Rolls eyes. Is prudishness on the rise lately?] So this is what you're downloading:

That's a nice library of goodies to play with. Add some really versatile shaders to this lot, and we can get some very nice results.

Speaking of shaders, I installed the pack I bought from Renderosity yesterday, and used the "rough sandstone" on the column M8 is leaning against there. That's a pack of rock and stone, including marble, concrete, bricks, pebbles ... it's going to be very handy indeed. But with some costumes to play with now, I'm going to be wanting fabric shaders. I love this:

Catalog image ... see this

Catalog image -- see this

Uh huh. Switch out the prosaic textures for something sumptuous and exotic. And do something with the Michael 8 body shape! Right now, he looks better with his clothes on ... let's see what we can do about that tomorrow, lol.

One last image for today:

This was a quickie to test a theory regarding the balance between IBL lighting and the, uh,  photometric light. And it worked! Safe to say, the lighting battle has been won. And I also stumbled over the dead easy way to get depth of field (DOF) to work. I mean, honestly -- ten seconds, one test render, and you're done.

Does anyone need to know how to do this stuff in Studio 4.11?? I still have plenty of problems about which I can do nada (4.11 will not save a file! That one is for tech support to fix, not me -- and they're not helping, not even 2%, after almost two months). But if you'd like to know the quick ways to make the new(er) DAZ do what you need it to do -- drop me a line, I'd be happy to share. You can always contact me via my gallery, and if you don't want to be bothered with emails, you can also contact me via a comment on my personal blog: put a comment, or request for secret-sharing, on this post, and Gmail will tell me I gotz a message. No problem. Comments are turned off on this blog because it was getting a lot of unpleasant remarks, being gay-friendly and dedicated to the heavy of the human form! Nooo, I am by no means an expert yet, but I've got a lot of stuff figured out -- enough to start having fun.

That's it for me, for today. Off to bed now. 'Night, all!

Hunky heroes, storybook landscape and a misty morning

A long rainy day again ... so, art! Just one more look at the character I call "Raven" -- the Guardian -- before we leave this guy again, and go on to others ... I, uh, cheated. He's standing in the middle of the Mog Ruith set, which is VAST to begin with, and I filled it with props, set lights inside and outside (see yesterday's work, for the way the light falls through the open door, for a start) ... then you have the wings, and that hair. I realized, a) you can't see much of the background, but it's all still there and has to be calculated, which means b) this render is going to take a week! Soooo...

I actually rendered the background separately, with everything else dropped out of the shot; and I just did it with a deep shadow map, because I knew I was going to blur the heck out of it to simulate DOF:

...therefore, I got the background in less than a minute! Blurred it (a lot; in Irfanview, for quickness) popped it back in as a backdrop, then all I had to raytrace was the figure - wings - hair combination; which made for a five minute render! Then, some work in Photoshop (highlights, body hair, eyes, shadows, bit of digital grading to direct the viewer's eye where I want it to go), and I was done.

So -- more, since I have a long afternoon to amuse myself through! Why not --

--a storybook kind of image. A misty dawn, in Bryce 7 Pro. No, it's not photo-realistic, but it's actually rather pretty, and is exactly the kind of thing you'd see in storybook illustration. Bryce is pretty decent with atmospherics, even if you don't get photographic results. So, why not?

And continuing on the theme of misty mornings, I went on to this:

Well, it's not really a painting, but it's nowhere near the photograph I started with! What do you want to call this kind of image? I mean, take a look at this:

If it's not a painting, what is it? I'm stumped as to what to call it, so I leave it to you!

While I was rummaging through the old file folders, I found a whole bunch of things Id forgotten, including some borders that were made about fifteen years ago. I couldn't resist this recomposition:

That one is well worth seeing at large size --

...by the time I'd done a dozen things to it, and stripped in a canvas texture as well as the old border (added with a Photostop bend), it came up looking like a painting; so I added highlights and shadows to accentuate the effect. Very, very nice.

Okay, that's all from me for today! Another rainy day tomorrow, as far as I know, and I'm pretty much "home alone" all weekend, so ... expect more art, if only to pass the time! Hope you enjoyed these!

The Raze of Palenque, and SF heroes!

I promised you a barbarian, and here he is! I call this piece "The Raze of Palenque" ... but whether this Conan-clone (Clonan?) razed the temple or tried to save it is another question. I'm inclined to see Conan types as heroes, so maybe he waded in and saved the day. As you know, I'm a huge fan of Frank Frazetta, and I just felt like doing something in that vein today.

Actually, this is a very, very new spin on an ancient piece of work I did for a contracted book cover (The Swordmaker, from Renaissance eBooks, circa 2011, I think). The original work was set up as per instructions from the publisher, character, costume and all; but I always thought, "Dang, what a waste," because the art I was asked to execute was soooo pedestrian. I did the best one could with it, but ... sigh. At the end of the day it was a paycheck. What else is there? But, but, but...

No reason I can't lift out the character, even the pose, and do something fresh, spectacular and rewarding with it. Especially since eight years have gone by ... and don't think Renaissance is even still online. If the book is circulating anywhere, I don't know, so -- here we are.

(For the artists among you: believe it or not, Clonan here is an old fashioned deep shadow map render. I did a raytrace, yes, and this is one of the very few images that looks infinitely better on a plain old deep shadow map, which takes 1% of the rendering time! I have depth of field (DOF) turned ON, and a virtual f-stop of 50, to get this effect. A lot of what you see there was painted in Photoshop, however: you won't be able to score this right out of the render engine. Nice!)

Also --

...this is not a rerender, but a massive repainting of a 2012 image. I always loved this character, but I can't find the project files!!! 😭 Am right now searching high and low for them, on backup drives and so forth. Praying that I put them in some weird place ... I admit, I had a loony way of storing things back in those days. I actually deserve to lose itens. Ahem. Anyway --

Since I can't find (yet) the project files, I decided to put the old render into Photoshop and repaint it. Whoo! Gorgeous result. The original picture was a great idea, but the render was fraught with problems, including the fact that the mesh was trying desperately to come apart! I'd driven the bump mapping on the torso hard, to get real detail out of it, and it was showing the seams in the contours. Sooo, I've done a lot of work there, to correct that; hand-painted the hair, and the eyes; thrown the background out of focus to create proper DOF (which you get in low-light photography), and ... lots of little details, such as brightening up the building lights. It's a lovely result. Photoshop to the rescue yet again!

And...

Just a repost of an oldie, for fun. This one is fine just the way it is, even though it was done eight years ago and painted in ... GIMP! I didn't even have Photoshop at the time. But when a picture is right, it's just ... right. This one is called "Cyborg," for pretty obvious reasons. The only thing I've done with the gallery image is to enlarge is to it'll serve as a wallpaper, if you'd like to collect it. You're welcome ... enjoy.

That's all for today. Good news from the optometrist: my vision has actually improved in the last year, no need to change my glasses, and I don't have to go back till 2021. Phew. Next: call dentist, make next appointment to stand there folding hundred dollar bills into paper airplanes (or aeroplanes, if you prefer) and launching them at the man. Then, if I get a more or less clean bill from him, we can start putting together the funding to look at the computer: new boot drive with contents cloned over; new NVIDIA video card; new USB sockets that don't waggle about; DAZ Studio 4.9.9.9.9.9, or whatever it is (they'll do anything but go to Studio 5), Genesis 8, IRay, and lots and lots of skinmaps and costumes, to get back to where we are right now with Michael 4. Ouch. Bear with me. 😱

CG Hero: chasing photorealism

CG character design ... sophisticated render: uploaded at 2000 pixels:
please DO see it full size! 

Chasing photorealism: depth of field, a single light source, film grain, you name it. This guy is pretty impressive, and if I had to make the call ... I do believe this render is a candidate for the best work I've ever been able to wrangle. Sophisticated. Here's a closer look, a detail crop:

It really has the look of a still from a movie. You take a second look and think, "What did I miss?"

I've got ONE light on this scene. Just one. The venous map is on the figure; the face is less than perfect (not pretty: very human -- a new face, designed for this project. Body designed for this project too). The focus is "off" just the tiniest bit, to fool the eye into accepting this as not a digital creation. This time, rather than doing Gaussian blur in Photoshop, in post work, I turned on DOF and did it in the original render --

Not a Lux Render! Just a raytrace ...  not a Genesis figure either. Oooold fashioned Michael 4, in DAZ Studio 3. 😀

Yep. I'll be coming back to this character!

The Magician ... boy, didn't this render up and paint nicely!

Couldn't resist coming back to the character I was playing with yesterday: the conjurer, the magician, what have you ... "Cassandro," with the touring magic show. Wanted to see how the character would render up with the "venous map" that makes him look like he's just being working out, and some tattoos added for texture, and a gypsy earring. Sooo nice! I changed the face very, very slightly, and did some painting:

...and you've got to like that. Someone is going to be asking, so ...

Nope, this is not Genesis anything. This is just good old Michael 4.2, wearing a face and body designed my me. That's the Aether hair, set to a kind of hazelnut brown and then painted red (Photoshop). The tattoos and magickal effects were also painted on/in in the painting stage. I also painted his eyes, and it took a lot of painting to get rid of the "artifacts" where the 3D mesh collapsed in the figure when I applied the venous map for extra realism. I've got DOF turned on ... and something like ten overlays of color painting to make the back/foreground visually interesting.

This is also not a Lux render. It's just a raytrace, while pulling every trick in the book to bring it up to a competitive level! And I reckon it worked. All the fabric textures and texture maps are also mine ... basically, photos of fabrics around the house.

And yes, I will be coming back to this character. I like him a lot, and there's a lot of potential in here. This sort of this, I can live with as a viable alternative to Lux and Genesis and all.

How much photo-realism can you squeeze out of raytracing?!

Assignment: how much photorealism can you squeeze out of old fashioned raytracing before you get into the more upmarket render engines, like LuxRender and SuperFly?  

And the reason I ask this is that I just spent half an hour on the gallery pages at Smith Micro, which is the company behind Poser. Hmm. Well, the fact is, if it's near-photorealism you're looking for...

...you'd actually be fairly surprised what you can do with raytracing, and it's not a million miles away from what you'd expect from one of the top-end engines. I'm asking this question because I have a LOT of images to render, and the version of LuxRender I'm running is slow. The new one is said to be seven times faster, but to get into that would take more than I have to give right now. So we'll just run for the moment on the old system and see how far we can push it. 

Which means I need to drive raytracing to the very limits it's capable of! And here we are, experimenting ... actually, jogging my memory too. I confess, it's been a while since I drove the software (have been far from physically well, as you know if you've been following these ramblings), and it turns out you can forget  how to fiddle all the details, just as your piano playing can get "rusty" through lack of use.

So, the model I chose to work with was a Michael 4 I developed five or so years ago for a book cover. At the time, the effect we wanted to achieve was ART, not photo, so the render was set up to give this effect:

The object was to achieve something much closer to a painting than a photo. That's two versions of M4. The bratty little imp on the right, and the more mature one -- which is the Michael 4 I chose to work with today. What did I do to make so much difference in him?

First: change the hairstyle. He's wearing SAV Eros short hair today. And then switch out the skinmap. The original dude is wearing the hi-rez Michael 4 "Millennium Man" skinmap, which is always a "go-to" skin when everything else fails. Today, he's wearing SAV Eros:

The skinmap is very pale and filled with texture; far from the "perfect skin" one looks for in a photographic model, and with good reason. This character is (!) a vampire. Check him out at Renderosity. I like this skinmap a lot because of its realistic texture. It also pairs up well with "less than perfect" faces. And when you drop this skinmap onto the face I designed for he old book cover, the effect is rather reminiscent of Vince Vaughan some years ago! And it does give the project a jump-start, if photorealism is the object today. The next item on the agenda was lighting

Out in the field, one can very rarely achieve "studio lighting" effects. There's a reason they scorn it as "available light." Natural daylight tends to be too bright, or too dim, or too harsh, or too blue ... always too something.   So let's use this deliberately.

I used just two distant lights, and deliberately overdrove one of them to get the "available light" effect. These lights are bright pale blue and dim soft orange. Shadows are turned on and left hard ... as per camera effects: depth of field is ON. The background outside the viewports is a photo which was blurred and blurred some more, and then blurred again, to match the amount of blur on the walls. I played around with adding film grain and lens flare in Photoshop, then decided not to. I think the render right out of DAZ Studio is good enough.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with this image in LuxRender. They don't always work, as this post shows! Very occasionally, the raytrace looks better. Also, there's a tendency for the Michael 4 "mesh" to collapse or distort. This doesn't become visible in a raytrace, but in a Lux project it can be catastrophic. So ... let's see what happens. Tomorrow.

Visit a Gypsy camp in LuxRender, Bryce and DAZ ... and Smith Micro said to me --

LuxRender: Leon and Roald at the Gypsy camp.
(click to see all images at pinup size)

DAZ Studio raytrace painted in Photoshop:
Roald at the fireside

DAZ Studio raytrace in four "laminated" layers:
Meet Iphigenia ... at the Gypsy camp (Abraxas, Chapter 10)

Bryce 7 Pro: the ruined cenotaph beyond Esketh

Bryce 7 Pro: atmospherics and dawn light:
the foothills on the way into the Blue Mountains

Viewers/readers with somewhat long memories will know what they're looking at right here! Yep. I've been delving into The Forgotten Songs again, since the plot notes, which were lost for upwards of a year and a half (!) turned up unexpectedly. And --

Wow. Going back into Abraxas with the resources of LuxRender and Bryce 7 Pro puts a whole new spin on this stuff. Check out this closeup out at full size, guys (it's 1000 pixels wide), even if you don't click to see the leader shot at full size:

Now, that's LuxRender for you, and I'm impressed. It's 90% of the way to a photograph ... like a still from a movie that doesn't exist. 

-- the render is high-rez enough for the venous map in the hand to show. I usually slap on a venous map, but you often don't see it. The map is a bump map (or displacement map, if you want to go that far) which raises the patterns of the veins in torso, hands, arms, so forth, for an added layer of realism. It's great to see this tiny detail in a render; like the wrinkles in the knuckles, too.

The third render for today -- where you meet Iphigenia (you've actually seen her before ... yep, that's Iphigenia in the underground with Leon, in the intense heat and humidity; ergo, a lotta skin, which is pretty typical of fantasy! (Have you noticed how, in movies, guys are dressed from neck to ankles while gals are flitting around in teeny little costumes? Either he's dying of heat stroke in those clothes, or she's freezing! Anyway, that's Hollywood for you, right?) Where was I? Ah yes --

The third render for today, the big scene at the Gypsy camp with all three characters, is a composite shot. It's actually FOUR renders laminated/layered together, starting with an old Bryce skyscape as the bottom layer, and ending up with the foreground vegetation rendered separately:

You start out with a Bryce sky and use his as the backdrop for a dead-simple background image rendered in DAZ Studio (hint: this can be low-rez; not even raytraced -- doesn't need to be). The shot was done at 3000 x 2000 pixels, shipped into Photoshop, blurred, painted, color balanced etc. Then it was shipped back into DAZ Studio to be used as the background for the middle-ground subjects: two Michael 4s and a Victoria 4, with character morphs, wigs, skin maps and costumes, plus a gypsy wagon (the proper name for which is vardo, incidentally...) and the campfire. Only three lights were set and the scene was raytraced ...which took about seven HOURS, just to render this middle ground. The render was sent to Photoshop to be tweaked and painted; then it was shipped back into DAZ Studio, where it was used as the backdrop for the foreground trees, bushes and grasses. So you had a four-layer render, plus --

-- quite a bit of Photoshop painting with those special brushes, after the fact, to get the teeny little details in. Why would you do the image this way? Because it allowed me to do the whole shot in something like nine hours, including painting. If I'd set out to raytrace the entire scene, all of a piece, it'd have been a 20 or 30 hour render.

Maybe it's just me; do I not have the patience to spend 30 hours on an old fashioned raytrace?! Does anybody have the patience these days? Right now, if we invest that kind of time in something, we expect a LuxRender or Octane image (ie., a photographic result) at the end. Beacause ... wellll, with the best will in the world, if you compare a closeup of the three-character raytrace --

(please view full-size ... it's 1600 pixels wide)

-- with the LuxRender fidelity ... no contest. The raytrace is like storybook art. There's nothing wrong with it. But the stuff coming out of Lux and Octane is generations beyond.

Not long ago, raytracing was the be-all and end-all of 3D rendering on any "civilian" desktop; and when I started this blog, I couldn't even raytrace! If I tried, my Lenovo PC crashed right back to the desktop. Kaboom! Now, just a few years later, we look at a raytrace and wish for more! So --

Just for the fun of it, I tried an experiment, to see just how much one can squeeze out of a DAZ Studio 3 raytrace and some Photoshop painting:

In fact, it's not bad at all, what with the colored point lights, depth of field, and then a whole lot of Photoshop work in post. As artwork goes, it's actually pretty darned nice. But, being human, we're never satisfied, and what we want now is a photo, not a painting! So --

Imagine my joy to get the latest Smith Micro newsletter, entitled "The Future of Poser." Long story short: Poser Pro 11, probably due next year, will have a render engine very like Lux or Octane built in, in addition to the highly-respected Firefly render engine. Built in!! Yowzer. Guess where I'll very probably be going in 2016! The only thing that would keep me from going there would be ... oh, if DAZ Studio 5 came out with a decent interface leaving behind the Donald Duck interface we see in Studio 4, and then the new Reality/LuxRender version is indeed 7x faster, as promised. Then, yep, I'd stay with DAZ and Lux. But you gotta admit, the lure of Poser Pro with a built-in unbiased render engine and the much-vaunted Firefly engine ... it's soooo tempting. Like cherry cheesecake.