Carrara

I only kind of looked at it, but at my skill level and use - it wouldn't be worth it to me =/

carrara is a modelling program first and foremost. you will have to create your scenes in poser/daz and import to carrara. i have no idea what the render times are in carrara, but poser w/ AO, raytraced reflections / lots of objects can take me up to 40mins to render.

if you're rendering 12 HOURS in daz, you've got a problem.

im not going to deter you from buying new programs, learning new things, but if you're looking for quick and easy i dont know if anything is quick and easy past poser itself.

Cinema4D is a awesome program, does some amazing(ly fast) renders, but its waaaaay more complicated than poser, and even more so than daz. if you're up for a challenge, and damn the learning curve, i say go for it.

yeah.. 12 hours is messed up IMO. I never had issues until I started using pwsurfaces and added shaders and AO and such. For example I prefer to render at a min size of 3000 x 3000 for postwork ease. With my Shay pic I scaled that down to 1800 just because it would freeze up. Even at that size rendering on a blank background it took about 3 hours just to render her HEAD. You can get some stunning results with pw but now I am having to think about buying their glowworm just to render in stages and composite myself for quicker renders. Not fun!

honestly instead of buying carrara i'd buy poser + hyperReal + occlusion master. its super skin shader, ao in 2 clicks , and a lot easier on the render times.

Not to derail, but what settings do you use in Poser to render Vex? It always takes me like 2+ hours... (for a single character)... and the higher the settings the more likely I am to freeze. Granted, I need a whole new baby (computer)...

--Sabby

:bdcake3