I haven't used DAZ in forever, but I decided to give it a go this week, as I downloaded the newest version around three days ago. I've been using Carrara 8.5 Pro for the longest and really enjoyed its lighting. Now, I'm not an avid user of DAZ, as I mentioned, but one would think that Carrara and DAZ have some basic commonalities seeing as how they are made by...well...DAZ. Not so :/ as we all know.

So, my issue as of now are my lights, or in this case...light. A spotlight, not to put too fine a point on it. I understand that DAZ has a default light that is supposed to cut off when a new light (spotlight) is dropped in. So I dropped in the spotlight and prior to rendering DAZ worked as advertised. The default lighting cut off and the spotlight came to life, illuminating just what I wanted it to. Again, that was prior to the render. Then I rendered the scene, as I like to periodically do while building, and the spotlight was cut off and the default lights were rendered in the scene. There must be a very simple step that I missed while adding the spotlight, but I read the manual, and even watched the video tutorial, and I didn't see anything that I could have missed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as always!

What render engine are you using?

And Carrara wasn't made by Daz... they just bought it and continue(d) to develop it. The software was built by several other companies long ago. Studio was built in-house by Daz3d. There is no reason to think the two would have anything in common as they are completely different code bases.

INVIDIA Iray is what's selected.

Thanks for the info on DAZ and Carrara. Since I've used Carrara it's always been by DAZ ;)

The Iray cameras have a built in light. In the camera tab this light can be selected as on, auto or off. Default is auto, which means it should shut off when another light is detected, but most folks have found the auto feature to be unreliable. Leave light on for scene setup, but turm it off for rendering. It is quite bright and will wash out most lights. Hope that helps.

The Iray renderer by default used an environment map (the Ruins HDRI) to light the scene as well as any local lights - to remove that in Render Settings set the Environment Mode to Scene Only to leave just the spotlight, and adjust the Tone Mapping settings to reflect the lower level of light.

Thanks for the tips, Rhett55 and RHaseltine! They helped out greatly!