I have all of the tropic groups but I can't get their locations right. I tried to put them all on the lfoor that didn't work. what's the trick to get all the scenes in the right location. and which camera and light is best for most of the scenes. oh is their a trick to get inside the cave? I have some modesl in the cave and some on the beach looking for each other as an opening scene I'm working on. thanks. still learning this stuff but need to jump a few feet ahead to try and get soemthing done here. oh is it easier to set this stuff up in daz or go right to poser since that's where the animation is going to be anyway.

links to the the product your talking about would be helpful...

when you load the items do they come in zeroed? if so you would want to move your camera to the top view and zoom out till you can see the whole ground. then move the items where ever you wish them........

to look inside a cave you would need to move the camera view.

does the product come with camera and light presets??

sorry about that 

http://www.daz3d.com/i/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=14083

this is I think the 5th part that's been made quest, plateau, forest, coast, another but forgot they all seam to be different locations and not at the correct xyz to match up. yea there lights cameras still learning how to use those if I install everything it goes black adn then  have to paly with it to see what going on. I was just going to email artist but daz doesn't give emails or at least I haven't found them yet.  I figured it would be in the web docs somewhere but haven't found it so figured it must be common knowledge.

I don't have any of this set, but camera manipulation is pretty standard. I don't know what you may or may not know about Studio's camera system, so some of this might be redundant to you.

When you load a fresh scene, you should get at least a default camera if the set doesn't come with more. The others (top, side, perspective) aren't true cameras. You can go to the light/camera tab and add more with the camera icon. In the top corner (left if you're in DS3, right if DS4) are the camera manipulation tools. Pretty easy to see what they do, experiment if unsure. Both right and left mouse buttons work and have separate functions, in case you can't quite get the angle you want.

There's also a sort of 'snap to' sortcut key command if you get tired of using the arrows on your characters to position them. Say you have a spot light or camera where your scene takes place. With your light or camera selected (either in the Scene tab or double click) hit control+c to copy the location of your camera, then select your character and hit control+v. It will mover your character to the location of your cam or spot light. If it's on level ground, like a street, control+d will drop your character to the ground of your scene. In your case, with multiple ground levels, just use the Y axis or green arrow and lower them where you want. 

Back to your original question, especially if you're animating, just focus on one set at a time. That's all you can really do anyway until all your characters are in the same scene. Think like a movie crew makes a film. They do all the shooting that occurs in that location, even if it shows up at different times in the script, until completed. This cuts costs and having to load and unload, set up equipment, or rental costs, etc.

Granted, we as 3D artists don't have to worry about that, but it is more efficient to work on one scene at a time rather then cutting back and forth to four different sets. It's also easier on your computer resources!

Anyhow, again I don't have your sets, but they may not have been intended to line up at all. If that's the case, there's an additional reason just to animate/pose/render et cetera the scene in that location and put it together in your choice of movie editing/compiling software later, which you're going to have to do anyway if you're stitching scenes together.

Just some food for thought...

There are some 20 plus cameras and lights so it gets confusing I just went down all of them and made notes where there located. 

I didn't think about breaking the story up in doing a scene at a time but it make sense. I don't know the whole story yet. just the over all idea adn the beggining.  I did think about doing it in small clips kind of like anime cartoons where they show a scene do alittle animation and talking and go to anther scene  to make it easier and quicker to get the story pieced to gether figure I could smooth theanimation or between scenes later as the story progresses. kind of a story board to work with but using the characters and the program to piece it together. but right now I'm just trying to get one scene I can work with and see if I can get my models to talk to each other and a little animation maybe walking around the beach looking at the island and the cave enterance. create a flyby scene of the island.

thanks this helps

Sounds pretty doable. You're free to do however you want of course, but all those cameras do sound like a headache. This is just me, but I've rarely found it necessary to have more than six and label them to their use (main, posing, face, ground, etc,) because, as you said, it can get confusing.

Some prop sets come jumbled together in literally hundreds of separate files, like any stonemason set. I've had to rename some as they come as jargon like u2building8204 or whatnot. I do the same with my characters, especially when I have multiples of the same figure on scene (two M4's for example), and parent all their effects when possible. That way everything moves seamlessly where they do.

Just one further note, and again, my apologies if you've been at this before, but rendering animation takes a surprising amount of time. Thirty second clips with all the lighting and shader effects on like ambient occlusion, raytraced shadows, etc, can take a really, REALLY long time. Be prepared to set aside some hours for your rig to do major computations. This is also a good time to assess your rig's cooling capabilities and needs.

When I built my main rendering rig, water cooling and massive case fans (2x 225cm main fans, one sucking in and one blowing out the top, among six various auxilirary fans) was a must. I put the best stuff I could afford a year ago, and I'm glad I did. There's a lot of good monitoring freeware available out there. I'd reccomend watching your temps and keep a close eye on them while you're running animations, as extended periods (think overnight) can cook a CPU real quick.

And above all else, have fun and enjoy the process!

Edit: I won't try to dissuade you from your project, as it's hugely gratifying to see it come together, but I ended up translating mine to a graphic novel approach with rendered scenes, text in post, then ran vocals and sound effects and compiled in Movie Maker. My rig could handle it, but I found my staff of 1 (me!) a bit too ambitious and overworked at the time. Its actually how I got into Daz studio, as I wanted to make a CG movie about one of my novels. I'm a movie 'enthusiast' as some would say, and this seemed like the only way it would ever come to life.

Now that I have more time and a better computer, I've considered picking up where I left off. See, look what you've done! Inspiration... =D

I just built this machine it's actually a game motherboard I figured they had the highest end systems. I might have gone to another type after putting this one together but I think it will do everything I need. I just wont use the 6 monitors and over clocking it's supposed to be able to handle. I was wondering who would use the water colling i've looked at those as well. I only got 8 gigs in this thing right now. looks like a lot of people are using 32 gigs. I do have an 8x 3600 processor. but yea it does get hot i have it in a clear case with 4 fans. I call my Naked Vampire 3600. it's a bat thing. I have been thinking about the rendering someone said it took them a week to do their rendering. the guy with the drum machine he's got a whole orchistra I think I read he had a whole bunch of computers working for 6 months on that project wow. so yea I've been thinkin about that and 1 person verson pixars army of 100's making a movie. I thinks it's still workable if you can take shortcuts like make smalll pieces of the movie at a time like 2 minute advertisiment and piece them together into a story. It might be alittle fragmented but atleast a movie would gradually get made. I think that is probably the biggist use of these forumes it finding ways to reduce the work load both person and machine so the project can be done in a resonable time not a 20 year project.Of course these compjuters keep getting faster and more powerful so eventually the hardware will make it easier atleast for the rendering. atleast we have 64 bit now did have that a few years ago when I started getting interesting in trying to do this. hopefullly this machine will get me started so I can disided what my next machine needs to be. ah my cs6 master collection just installed have to check it out. need to install it on my 32 bit machine now. 

Interesting that you mentioned Pixar, as I was going to throw that in too. When I was building this rig again, I was doing a lot of reading about GPU rendering and also went with an asus mobo with SLI. Very interesting, if you get the chance to research it. It really will be the next big leap for rendering, but at the moment, the only commerical product that doesn't cost a fortune is Octane. I looked at it during their beta, and its limited to Nvidia cards with CUDA. Fortunately, I selected twin GTS450's with 192 cuda cores.

Short story is GPU rendering like having all the available cores of your video card doing real time rendering. The only hang up is that you're limited to the on-board capacity of the card(s) memory. Mine are 2gb each, so you could run a decent sized scene in about 45 minutes. I've been really into Luxrender, using Paolo Ciccone's Reality plug-in for Daz studio. Matter of fact, it just came to Rendo very recently. Lux supports GPU rendering with what they title SmallLuxGPU. It's in its developmental infancy, of sorts, but functions well enough. Anyhow, Reality supports animations also, and the renders you can achieve are as close to photo-real as any stand alone render engine out there. Matter of fact, I've all but abandoned 3Delight in the last year except for mocking up scenes.

Sorry, got off on a tangent there. :) Back to Pixar...

So, while I was reading up on GPU stuff, I came across an article about Pixar and ILM's renderfarms. As it turns out, aside from their staff of animators and whatnot, each employ renderfarms with greater than 5000 cpu's. Massive processing power! One example was that ILM, while working on Transformers, used said 5000+ cpu's to render an animation shot that took almost a solid year to render (not sure what the length of the animation was, but dare I suggest, it was large).

That's what kinda killed my movie making prospects, but then again, doing it in Studio and not Lux is far easier and less time consuming. I've got a hex(6) core AMD black chip, overclocked to my usual 3.6ghz for stability. Watercooled, it never goes over 38 degrees at full load :D  Not quite 5000 cores, but with GPU, that could be 384. And with a hybrid CPU+GPU, you can do some serious rendering!

Now its just a matter of time until the development gets more stable!

Sorry to keep volleying back and forth with this, but it's exciting to see the prospects of the future.

Edit: Also, my first animation experience was in Vue 8. My intro scene ran at a piddly 1024x720 and took 21 hours for 45 seconds of video @ 24 frames per second. Ugh... This does bring up an idea though. One shortcut is reducing the size of your resolutions to make it faster. If you're doing one for web, like youtube, 840x680 or whatever the equivalant of 480p is will speed it up greatly. I like your idea about 2 minute sections too. You could collect those and roll them together when the project is completed for a feature length or 30 minute short!

Okay, rant completed.

When I usually render a scene I immediately use the default camera as the render camera, then I make a second camera to move around and look at all the details of the scene, Also, don't forget you can view things through spotlights and distant lights as well so you can see exactly where the light falls, this is INCREDIBLY helpful!