I really hate having to ask you folks all these questions, especially since I have been using Carrara for so long but I seem to be having one of THOSE weeks, where C6 just doesn't want to cooperate.  I know you all probably have better things to do, but I am pulling my hair out over this render.

First I hadthat weird spot problem, which made me delete all but the most basic of lighting, then I had the speed issue, which finally up when I completely recreated the scene.  Now I am having another lighting issue.  If I use the my scene preview from the realistic sky editor, it looks great.  But with any other render, rest or full, It looks like the female model has no lighting at all.  I will attach a few images to let you see what I mean. 

I am using one light, a single sun light which is in front of the model and targeted at her.  I have global brightness punched up a bit, and I have the ambient light set to 30%, and still all  get is what looks like a dark silhouette.  Any suggestions?

Rich

This is what I get on the sky editor...

Here is a partial render.  I aborted it when I saw that it wasn't getting any lighting again.  You can also see my render settings in this one.

First: you are working and need to do a more faster render when just testing the scene, so down a little all this slow stuff like Antialiasing (use fast for preview), turn off Improved Edges (Slow, very slow), Use Lighting Quality to Fast and use 1 pixel, its far more faster.
Now the problem: add a primitive (cube or sphere) in the same place that the character is, render a preview (low resolution and low settings! Its a preview!), if the primitive get in to the dark so you need to encrease the Sky Light intensity. Sometimes when working qith sky you could put clouds in front the sun...

Well.  The settings I showed were my normal high quality settings.  I always do spot renders with almost everything turned off. I tried adding another light, a bulb to see if it was a cloud issue.  I will attach an image of he result.  I tried using the sphere to see if it was a skinning issue, but that messed up in a weird way.  I am trying one now with increased sky light intensity.

Here is the first test

Here is the sphere.  It seems to be behaving like there is some sort of gel...

I took out the extra bulb, and increased the skylight texture to 400% and this is what I get.  I'm currently looking for any artifacts that might have gotten left over from something.

Think I have said it before, but I only ever test render at the default settings and with no GI.

Secondly, I suggest setting at "the best" settings for rendering is probably often only a theory and not based on the real quality/effects that are really necessary for your true end needs.

I would tend not to change default settings other than after you have checked changes/adjustments, one by one, to justify thier usage..

Brian

I usually render at extremely high DPI and resolutions so I can get a good print out at poster sizes at the local print shop.  I do test renders poretty much at default. This problem seems to be occuring at any setting or resolution.  I tried at base normal settings and the same thing happened.  I am also noticing a few other odd things in the last couple of projects.  First, I seem unable to copy some objects.  I wanted to try and isolate the problem so I created a brand new document and tried to copy the model to it, however after selecting her groupm I do not get the copy option from the edit menu, it is greyed out.  This also happened with the battlesub.  I end up having to export the individual object groups and then import them into the new document.  Also I have noticed that if I get too close to an object, it disappears.  The only way to prevent this from happening is to reduce the distance to near plane value.  In the render I am having the problem with, it had to be set all the way down to zero.  This never happened before I updated to 6.21 so I am assuming it is probably a bug.  Normally I can det around it, but in this render I just can't shake the problems.

Ok.. update.  I started a completely new document and imported each model individually into it, then rebuilt the scene from scratch.  I used a different terrain and the same realistic sky settings with a bit of haze this time for effect.  I have only one light source, a single sunlight, and the ambient set to 5%.  I started a new render and it is not only performing flawlessly, but it is flying by this time.  I am chalking this one up to some spontaneous goofiness on behalf the lovely C6 lighting system. :)

Very strange...I never had problem with 6.2.1

Yeh it rendered half way and gave me a memory allocation error when it got to the island in the background.  I really think that they should stabilize the existing functions some more before they add a bunch of new stuff.  I wasn't even using full high quality settings. Oh well....  Back to the drawing board.

I've seen this kind of thing before with some shader plugins. Got any experimental ones or ones that are supposed to do some things with lighting but probably lack the ability to properly interact with ray-tracing?

If it is the plugins, pulling them shouldn't hurt anything and your render should return to normal. However you'll lose any of the special effects that were in shaders that used the plugin to control a channel.

Actually I don't have any add on plugins.  I wish I did :)  The shaders I am using are fairly simple.  I am not even using any layered lists.  Since this was supposed to be a quick render scene, just to show off the sub model; all of the other content I am using is straight out of the box shaders from C6 Pro and some poser content.  C6 totally crashed right after I wrote that last message and I had to restart it.

 You are not the only one experiencing weird problems. I am saddened to that fact that my fears have materialized. I always thought that Carrara was not a good fit for DAZ. I gave them the benefit of the doubt but to me, it is increasingly apparent that DAZ direction with Carrara and that of all the RayDream/InfiniD users of old is not entirely compatible. DAZ seems to have prioritized making Carrara compatible with their content at the expense of stability.

I am with you 100% when you state that DAZ ought to fix the prevailing bugs in Carrara as opposed to adding more features. Stability and usability should be paramount. I am not even sure if the traditional DAZ customer base is even that interested in Carrara that much, since they don't commonly produce their own content. DS also seems to more then adequately serve this customer base. Some can't even realize what benefit Carrara might have over DS.

I bought Modo, and I am on the process of learning it. Very impressive so far. I will still use Carrara, but it certainly will not be my main 3D program like it has been since before it was even called Carrara.

Hexagon seems to be yet another causality from the DAZ/Eovia acquisition. Even more so then Carrara because it's development has been stifled completely by DAZ, du to the fact of not keeping the original development team on the payroll. Sad, because even against Modo, Hexagon does have advantages in usability. I do not blame DAZ for not wanting to keep a french based development team overseas, but still Hexagon will probably never reach it's full potential now do to these circumstances. DAZ promised informally that they would have a bug free new version by last November, well we are reaching the one year anniversary of that date and what we got was a half baked patch that broke more then what it fixed.

I still hold a bit of hope for Carrara since the original development team is still on board. Also it seems to be at the very least patched more frequently then Hexagon. Hexagon is the one that I have lost all hope. I will still keep an eye on it's development, but now my time is used learning Modo.

I know what you mean about Carrara content.  I am trying to develop some content for the marketplace, but have run into a few obstacles.  The first and most annoying being the fact that Carrara files are so much bigger than most Poser or Daz Studio content.  Let's face it, most of the content for Poser etc. are just image maps and morph files.  And their mesh data is fairly simple compared to something like Carrara.  To market a Carrara file, you have to include all of the texture maps bitmaps as well as the .car file itself.  Renderosity has a strict 70MB max with a 35MB max filesize times 2.  This is great for small poser files, but Carrara files that size are nearly impossible for any semi decent detailed models or scenes.  I have one model right now that I can't send up because the .car file is 49MB, and they wont take that file size, which I consider a bit draconian and unrealistic if they really want to host content made for Carrara.  Why not let people upload a single file under 70MB.  That at least would be doable.  I have made this suggestion in the marketplace forum, but it has either been curtly shot down or just ignored.  Oh well...  Someone suggested I see about selling at Daz and it has been two weeks since I sent them a sample image of the first model I want to put there.  I got an email telling me it wouldn't be looked at for a week.  That was 2 weeks ago and still no word, despite a reminder I sent them.  So I guess they aren't too interested either.  It's a real shame too.  This is why you don't see a lot of Carrara content on the sites.  With the outdated and arbitrary file size limits, and the fact that some sites don't even seem to have anyone who can test the products, all you are left with are shader files and scripts.

If I had the financial resources I would start my own site at this point...  Like I said, a real shame.

Rich

(Typoes included at no extra charge.)

well, anyway, sparrow - glad to know ya got that file to render.
in regard to their file size restrictions, maybe there's some way to split up yer item
into sections or add-ons.  but to be fair, they're not really geared up to deal with
carrara files here.

Unfortunately, they only take .zip files, and not a lot of people use an unzipper that can handle spanned zip files.  They said they don't plan on taking rar files which is a shame since you can span them and they compress more.  Not as many people use zip files nowadays for that reason.

I should be uploading the render today with any luck.