The hardware renders are pretty good but not acceptable for a final product. SOmetimes Im amazed at how good a hardware render can look, but it doesn't cover all bases like software does. Indigo is great as can be, but takes too long and uses too much resources for less important projects or projects that don't have to look 100% real. I think that a software render plugin on the level of Daz's would be awesome I would use that for my movie projects and Indigo for my stills and shorts. Honestly, I am working on feature length animations here and while I can see myself finishing five feature length animations in five years, I can't see them rendered in Indigo. Even with network rendering, exporting 216,000 frames would  be an enormous undertaking. I know it's possible once the scenes are all laid out, but it's a heavy lift -- let alone rendering that terabyte export in Indigo. With Daz, 3Dlight wasn't the limitation. It was Daz's animation palette, even with the Animate plugin. 

I could make a lot more money with Iclone if I could render a Daz-quality software render, even if  it takes ten times longer than a hardware render.

Well, there was a lot of discussion concering a better/other render solution going on already. All kind of technologies were mentioned. Hopefully in future we will get a better real time renderer within iClone and besides some other plug-in options for external rendering.

Real time is a misnomer. Takes my card 20 seconds on some complex scenes, and I'm always interested in quality over speed, though not to the extent that Indigo takes it. I want to make more than demos. I want to make movies -- before I die.

If 3Delights were part of ICLONE, then we would have got many wonderful TOON SHADERS as well, like in DAZ.
I still can't figure out why RL does not prefer 3Delight when it is supposed to be FREE for single cpu.

The thing is, with all the features of Iclone, a 3dlight system added on, or really anything similar, like Poser's renderer, would push Iclone over the top. I'm not saying that I can't use Indigo. I"m just saying that I might have to buy three more computers plus a network rendering licence for what I want to do.

Maybe you should consider a render farm, till RL has fixed this issue.

By the way ... did any iCloner utilize a render farm yet?!

Didn't know I had that option. I'll look into it.

Sad thing is, some of the hardware renders really look good enough, but others just look like games.

I'm all for having more than one render option but I wouldn't be in favor of 3Delight. I used it for the longest time with DAZ, but I don't like having a limited CPU cap. There are other render engines out there that won't lock you to one cpu or one video card, for that matter. From what I see, I think it's far more likely that we might see IRay come to Iclone rather than 3Delight. They're already using NVidia Physx for clothing and it looks like they're going to be switching over to it for the rest of the physics effects in Iclone. For that reason, it would make more sense that they use the NVidia Iray Render that's designed for its own physics engine. You end up with too many cooks in the Kitchen when you have one company doing the render engine, another doing the physics, etcetera, etc. This means also that if Nvidia Improves its physics or adds features in the future, you don't have to wait for the render engine to catch up --because it'll be built in. Same render engine as the physics engine speeds up any development and frees Reallusion Iclone from having to worry about compatibility.