> Quote - The lighting result of Lux depends on many, many things. Almost impossible to right down in a short comment. > > My first tip however, would be to replace the spotlights with small meshlights positioned at the place the spots are now. Spotlights give razor sharp shadows and with small meshlights you can 'steer' the softness of the shadows. > > Luxrender lights are very different from the Daz lights and you cannot automatically convert a Daz light into a Lux light. I know that Lux picks up pointlights, distantlights and spotlights but my advice is to avoid those. Use the lights that are designed for Luxrender otherwise you are selling yourself short. > > There is also no need to use 'houselights'. Simply disable 'Preview lights' in the 'Window' tab. That way you keep a clear overall lighting in your scene if you stil decide to keep using Daz lights. > > Not much, but I hope this will set you in the right derection. :)

I think my current problems are that by using the mesh lights Reality provides tends to push things to the opposite end of the spectrum. They appear extremely dim at render, and it's a lot harder to direct them so it doesn't interfere with the scene as you can with spotlights. Also, since the scale of the light directly affects the strength, it can be hard to balance it out. Striking the balance is probably Reality's steepest learning curve, especially since a lot of the focus is on the lighting. I've also found it extremely difficult working with the materials, as the options are far fewer than in Daz Studio. I'm used to being able to tweak all kinds of settings like subsurface scatter (sorely missed in Reality 2.0), reflection strength and more, as well as creating less natural elements using the pwShaders like plasma or fire. Moving from having so many options to having so few puts me a little out of my element.

The above render, for those curious, was going for well over 20 hours. It's still far from perfect, as one can tell from the amount of noise, and the skin and hair aren't particularly lifelike yet. I'm moving onto the later builds of Luxrender since they seem to be improving their 'firefly' removal by leaps and bounds, but it could be a while yet before I'm comfortable using it regularly.