Razor42 posted at 9:45PM Tue, 26 January 2016 - #4251417

Do be aware, some characters sold at DAZ look like crap in 4.9 because of the big change in IRAY. I have 3 or 4 G3F characters that look awful.

On the figures mats issue, there should be updates being rolled out for the figures with new Mat presets that have settings for both 4.8 and 4.9 IRAY which should help with the issue. It's an unfortunate side effect of corrections been made to the IRAY render engine which does bring some significant improvements as well as hurdles.

In general it is early days for Daz Connect, hopefully as people can highlight their individual issues, as you have done here. There can be solutions found that can help mitigate the issues and find individual solutions. I see you have raised the issue with Rawb so hopefully he is working on something to help with networking content.

My frustration, as far as connect goes, is that they were aware of users like me. I'm not sure if they were rushed out the door because of a management decision or if they just see folks like us as a small enough group not to matter that much. But, since they chose a renderer that doesn't work well on Macs, I'm stuck using a crappy windows computer (that cost more than my main mac, but has a decent nvidia card and an awful OS...windows 10) to use their software. They could at least try to avoid making using their software more painful! ;)

As for IRAY 4.8 vs 4.9 differences, attached is a picture containing Selina, a character sold at DAZ as she is ATM (I have yet to receive an update for her). Far left is 4.8 with the fixes posted in the forums, middle is as she looks loaded without modifications and the far right is what she looks like in 4.8 (the camera in the two versions isn't the same...I just loaded her and sort of zoomed in sort of the same amount...lol). I realize that this isn't really a DAZ issue...but, management SHOULD have waited to release the software only after these products were ready to release as well. If I didn't know why she looked like this, I would have immediately thought this was false advertisement and immediately asked for a refund. I mean, that is practically grayscale as it is. No color at all! This is not the only one I have found that is equally bad.

Even changing the reflectance tint, she still doesn't look quite as nice as she does in 4.8, but she doesn't look like she's dead. I guess that's an improvement:) I haven't spent the time to play with the settings to figure out what really needs to be done and I probably wont, since I have a nice...functional 4.8 to use. If I end up wanting to use her along side some products (that are available in the DAZ store ATM) that crash 4.8, I'll either pester the help desk there, or put the effort in making her look good. I expect that the products I purchase work out of the box...and, IMHO, as sold at DAZ, this product and many others simply do not work right.

Oddly, my G2X stuff still looks fine in 4.9 (stuff being 3delight shaders converted by scripts as well as a couple of characters that came with iray shaders). Maybe those converted shaders are too generic to take full advantage of IRAY or maybe the authors knew about the weirdness between the two and planned a decent middle ground...I don't know. I haven't compared them to see if they actually look better in 4.9, it's possible, but Selina was the first character I tried in 4.9 and I was appalled. I LOVE silver's work, and this was my favorite G3F character, so it seemed like a good choice to test with. I don't blame Silver for this, but I do think DAZ made a big mistake releasing 4.9 before updating all of the content sold for IRAY before release.