Quote - 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 blown out is simply a matter of having overexposed the scene. You need to to adjust the exposure for those lights and they will retain the amount of detail that you want. If the lower exposure makes the rest of the scene to dark that simply means that the contrast ratio that you have for your lighting is too high. In that case you need to add more ambient light so that everything is lit correctly for the exposure selected. 

Regarding the poke-through, that is something that has to do with how Studio passes the geometry to the plugins, there is nothing that I can do about it. It's in the hands of DAZ.

Cheers.

Paolo

https://www.preta3d.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/RealityPlugIn
Tw: @preta3d
G+: https://plus.google.com/106625816153304163119
The Reality Gallery: https://reality-plug-in.deviantart.com