Well, I just ran my own test with fastscatter, and it makes absolutely no difference if raytrace is turned on or not. The renders were exactly the same, so long as there's no raytrace materials or shadows in the scene. In fact, I was able to render the fastscatter effect with the P4 engine as well. Maybe your guru made a mistake, or maybe he was referring to something else?

The only things that require raytracing in Poser 5/6 Firefly are reflections/refractions, AO, gather, fresnel, or raytraced shadows. Otherwise, it's not being used.

Rest assured, if any element of your scene was actually using raytracing in Poser 6, the rendertime would be far more significant than what it is now. That, I'm sure is playing a big difference in the rendertime benchmarks you are running as well.

Firefly is not good at raytracing anything, at least not at high quality. It's painfully slow compared to true raytrace engines like Carrara has. Compare the AO in Poser vs. that in Carrara 5. There's no contest. Compare the quality of reflections or raytraced shadows, and you'll see there's no comparison in the way of rendertime.

If you're absolutely sure you won't ever need to use any raytraced effects (even for a mirror, or metal material), then I don't know what you are looking for other than what you already have inside of Poser. Carrara definitely handles more geometry, but other than that, Poser is going to do just as well, pound for pound. If you're looking for more realistic lighting, then you'll have that in Carrara. The GI is much better than the IBL in Poser, but you will pay for it at rendertime. Also, I have had problems using GI in Carrara for animation. I often have to deal with noisy artifacts in the scene, and the only way to cure it is to turn up higher settings, which of course will make rendertime suffer even more. The result is stunning, but you will need patience.

Message edited on: 01/30/2006 21:20