Quote - Transmaps kill DS performance in my experience, and even though DS 4.6 is faster for me, a thick lush hair and 3Delight just grinds down to a snails pace.

I bame the render engine, no idea why 3Delight is so slow with transmaps.  Ugh.

It has to do with shadows, ambient occlusion and raytrace calulations.

Seems like all the render engines slow down on transmapped hair. But Omnifreaker figured out a way a while back to improve it with UberHair... http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberHair It has controls to disable some features to speed up renders yet still get good looking hair.

If it's not hair slowing your renders, check your settings. Perhaps something got bumped up or down. The new version of 3Delight in Studio is faster. But if you have the wrong settings, you will get slooooooow renders as before. Some of the higher quality settings are just not needed.

There are things that can really speed up renders in 3delight that aren't done because of maintaining some compatibility with the Poser Firefly engine and to keep things simpler for many users. There are things you can do with geometry which DAZ has done with Genesis that will speed things up, and you can use Texture Atlas or any photo editing software to reduce your texture sizes which will also speed things up. There are also lighting tricks like rendering a scene separately for each light used and compositing all the renders together blending your layers. Simple lighting renders much faster than complex as there are fewer calculations involved. You will get the same results by compositing each separately lit scene together as you got rendering with all the lights on but in much less time as shown in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F79cgGPEU_k

You can find various speed up tricks in the 3delight site in the manual and also there are some speed up tricks in the DAZ forums.

You don't have access to some of the settings in their manual since DAZ has the stripped down version, but many are there and at least you'll have a clearer explanation of why the settings work the way they do.

http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_52.html

And Adam's render tips at DAZ. I do believe his script works in 4.6 but he explains the settings so you can manually set them in Studio:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/16085/