Good tip for removing the backgrounds. I have to admit, I hadn't considered using that method, and it's fairly straightforward and quick to do. I have Photoshop CS5, so the tecnhique is well known to me, I just never thought to apply it in such a way.

As for the why of ambient strength, I offer you the example above. This was rendered in Lux using point lights (yes, its an ugly method) at the locations of the fire and the ice. I had originally set them to be light emitters, but the results made the texture 'blown out' as I wanted them to be fairly bright. The glare was added in post using Photoshop, not via Lux. Those are Jepes' Elementz. Essentially flat planes with alpha maps and textures to mimic fantasy effects. Arguably, such things can be added in post, but occasionally I have them partially obscured by scenery and the like, so it's sometimes useful to keep them in the scene.

Moving on from my own bad habits though, there is one issue I hope that has an easy solution. I have a lot of Genesis outfits, and many of them use mesh smoothing. In Daz, the smoothing seems to behave as expected, but when it's converted to Lux I see visible poke-through. A quick web-search revealed a post on the Pret-A-3D site which indicated the problem has been mentioned before, but I couldn't find a solution for it.

Have you had the opportunity to speak with Daz and discover what's causing the oddity? If so, was a solution ever proposed? It'd be extremely useful to be able to use smoothing without worrying too much about how it translates.