Check the R'osity forum, espeially stuff by Bagginsbill. Lots of good info there on all aspects Poser.

With regards to your Conan, he'd probably say the reason your ID version wasn't as nice was that it was too brightly lit and not gamma corrected.

It appears from his analysis, and it is likely true, that most of us produce images with lighting too unrealistically bright to make up for Poser's usual lack of ID and GC. We design scenes around what we did for Poser 7 and earlier, which were really workarounds to try and fudge what PoserPro 2010 actually does properly. So of course the results in PP2010 will look relatively poor when its lighting is quite different.

Try relighting from scratch with ID amd GC in mind and see what you get.

Thank you for that. I wasn't quite understanding the concept. Doesn't always look better though. I did the same with the Conan image I have posted in the HM Gallery but I decided to post the one without IDL simply because it was shadowy and more moody which was what I wanted. I get how it works now, so thanks a bunch :)

And the ID version there is indeed better because there's simply more environment to generate ID with.

I wonder. I just did an image of Wonder Woman bathing that I posted in the adult gallery. I'm wondering if it would look better with IDL. I may try rerendering it for a comparison.

Ahhhhhh even more telling.

If the render is just a figure without any background, then indirect lighting won't do a hell of a lot. Reason being is that there isn't much of anything around to reflect light and so produce any INDIRECT lighting. You'll get a little bit of light bouncing off the figure itself providing some ID, but nothing else of note.

The GI Studio props themselves are essentially large light panels, but to get the most of ID, you need an environment for it to be generated in.

So in this case, definitely not worth the extra render time. In another setting, it'd be a different story.

actually, i used Global Illumination Studio instead of standard poser lights. background was rendered seperately.

Well it appears as if there's not really enough in the scene to actually taker advantage of ID in this case. The city in the background wouldn't be any source of lighting, and assuming you used an environment dome here it could be replaced by IBL with perhaps another light to beef up the shadows..

ID DOES have some great uses, but in a scene like this? Not so much.

The forums on Renderosity have some great discussions on this subject.

Awesome POV...