I've been looking more and more into Daz Studios lately, and the thing that impresses me the most is the more advanced renderer over Poser's, such as more realstic shadowing and lighting as well as reflections, among some other things. One of the reasons I do my final renders in Lightwave is because Poser lacks in advanced rendering techniques

So my question is, would it be much of a hassle to make the switch from Poser to Daz? I have a ton of content, many of which probably had seperate Daz installers (such as items from the Daz store). Will I need to go through all my files and reinstall them? Will I be able to get away with just transfering my Runtime folder?

Also does Daz export obj/mtl files so that I can still render in Lightwave should I wish to? I guess these are the only questions that are holding me back from making the switch

You can just set your Poser Runtime in the D|S preferences and have access to all your Poser files immediately.

I would, however, suggest you install the D|S specific files as well.  In relation to the surfaces, most Poser content will look much better after applying the D|S materials in Studio.  There are some pretty big differences particularly in skin settings, lights and MAT settings.

Poser specific files will work in D|S but you will find yourself making Surface parameter changes frequently if you are not using D|S specific settings.

Poser lights are always too bright for D|S.

Thanks for the reply. I guess my problem would be to hunt down all the content that came with DS materials over 4 seperate hard drives, and figuring out which ones actually came with them or not >_<

also there are the poser procedural materials that will not work in D/S and poser dynamic cloth won't either but other than that i've found tokejr's statement to be right on the button

If your download speed is good it might be faster to check your online account downloads instead of going thru your hard drives to find which things have daz files...even if you just use the info to search your drives.

As for the dynamic stuff...daz has dynamic too.

Studio does have dynamics but you can't create your own like you can in Poser, has to be made by Optitex

Quote - Studio does have dynamics but you can't create your own like you can in Poser, has to be made by Optitex

............And is windows Only

Not quite sure what Optitex is. I'm on windows though, so no worries there

Optitex is the vendor who makes the dynamic clothes for Daz..as far as I know you can get the clothes at Daz only ...so it is proprietary.

Well I finally have my install of Daz3d, so I'm trying to learn how to use it now. It took me a few minutes to figure out the steps to take on how to import my Poser Runtime folder, but got that all working now

I tried to import one of my set characters but it gave me an error saying something was out of limits. I selected leave limits off between the 2 choices it gave me, and it seemed to import the character just fine. The only problem was her hair was a small distance above her head. I tried to readd the hair, but it seems none of my hair models "snap" to the head like they do in Poser and force me to manually position the hair. Maybe I'm missing something?

I am impressed how vastly faster render times are compared to Poser, though I'm not very fond if it's layout, or the hassle of setting up what should be simple settings. I suppose every program has it's learning curve, so I guess I'll have to go hunt down some daz tutorials or something. Think I saw some helpful youtube ones

I'll probably end up bouncing between both Poser and Daz until I'm completely comfortable with Daz, but most of my final work will probably still end up being in Lightwave

Thank you everyone who has replied and helped out

Some hair props apply themselves to the selected  figure when you load them into the scene,  others appear as a separate item in the scene & have to be 'parented' to the head.

In the parameter tab there is a selection for "fit to".  Select the hair and see if it is set to whatever character you are using.

The "fit to" only works for hair "figures", I was refering to the hair prop kind under the Hair directory. I can still parent the hair to the head, but it doesn't automatically fit to it like it does in Poser. Even if I save the character model with the hair in place in Poser, then load it into Daz, the hair for some reason moves some distance above the head, and I have to readjust it manually

Is the figure scaled? In DS scale is inherited, in Poser it isn't, so that may lead to problems - if that is the case, try alt-clicking on the hair's scale slider.

Hair should (as in usually does) parent if the figure is selected when you load it, as in Poser, but I'm not clear if your problem is a lack of parenting or a failure to align.

Ok I suppose I should have done abit more testing. Apparently it seems like it's just the 1 hair style. It will auto-parent to the head, but none of the fit morphs will work for some reason. The other hair prop models seem to work fine though

As for the hairs not working before, it was probably because as you mentioned, the character was scaled down a little. So thanks for that little bit of info :)