This is an old, old bugbear, and I've finally decided that I have to get to the bottom of this. I've done a large batch of test renders and it'll take a few posts to get them all uploaded, so it may initially seem like a bit of a monologue... ;o)

But if anybody has any thoughts/comments on this subject then please do post them here.

First, the problem - in real life 'sharp' edges/corners are rarely actually 'sharp'. Look at your desk, or the door, or the window frame, or the building outside your window, etc. Look at the 'sharp' edges and corners on them - no, they're not really sharp at all.

(Yes, of course, if you're far enough away they will appear sharp, but I'm looking at them from quite close - I want to see that noticeably rounded effect that most real world 'sharp' edges produce. Actually I want to see a bumpy pitted rounded edge effect but I'll go onto that a bit later...)

Let's start with something simple, the most basic cube mesh - 8 vertices, 12 edges, 6 faces. If you render such a cube in any version of Poser with default settings you get very sharply defined edges/corners.

If you tick Poser's 'Smooth Polys' render setting, then when rendered those edges/corners will be smoothed as if the cube's been inflated almost to bursting point - not what I'm after at all.

You can bevel the edges of the cube in a modelling program. Now when render in Poser with default settings those edges don't look so sharp. But when you look close instead of each sharp 90° edge you now have two sharp 45° edges. If you then tick 'Smooth Polys' and render the balloonish inflation isn'tso bad, but it's still noticeable.

I remember reading somewhere, ages ago, that adding an edge loop on each side of each bevel, such that the newly created faces adjacent to the bevel faces are a similar size to the bevel, could help in controlling how subdivision (and thus Poser's 'Smooth Polys') affected the bevels.

So I've created a test object - a simple cube, plus a disc-with-a-hole surrounding it. I then duplicated this and added a bevel to each of the edges I want to be 'sharp'-but-in-a-rounded-way. I then duplicated this bevelled version and added edge loops either side of each bevel.

Image below shows the mesh, a Poser 6 (yes, six - this is an old, old conundrum!) render using default render settings (except that quality has been slid up to 'Final'), and another Poser 6 render with everything the same except that 'Smooth Polys' has been checked

And here are the settings, etc, just to be complete (note: material settings are for the follow-on tests in the next few posts).

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The 3Dcheapskate (also available in DAZ and HiveWire3D flavours) occasionally posts sensible stuff. Usually by accident.
And it usually uses Poser 11, with units set to inches. Except when it's using Poser 6 or PP2014, or when its units are set to PNU.