Quote - ........... Interesting that M is doing a WW1 plane. I was wondering whether the new cloth simulator in Blender could be used to stretch the fabric over the wings. Dangit... you got me wondering now....

Try this build or one of the related builds in this branch if it hasn't been tried already since I'm a day late reading this thread.

http://graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=669

Rubicondigital has a very good tutorial on how to achieve the best balance of render settings to results in D|S. It is well worth looking up and studying.

Create the particle strands and apply all the modifications required.

Press F9 to enter editing

Under the modifier tab click Convert

Press TAB>A to select all the vertices

Press E>ONLY EDGES>X>.001 to extrude a minute amount along the X-Axis. You can of course do this according to whichever axis is most suitable for your situation.

This creates simple strips of faces that are renderable in outside programs after exporting the hair mesh.

Of further note, you can extrude the faces created  by the same amount along the perpendicular planar axis to create square strands then apply the subsurf modifier to round and taper the strands.

This creates much more realistic hair but is only effective for sparse hair such as eyelashes, eyebrows and random body hairs because of the huge increase in poly count.

Example: 1000 particle strands of 5 vertices each after extrusion equals 10,000 vertices. Extruding again raises the count to 20,000 vertices. Applying the subsurf modifier at the default setting will then generate approximately 80,000 vertices.

A good compromise is to create the bulk of the hair using traditional methods and generate a few strands of particle generated mesh strands for realism using the double extrusion outlined above.

In PS

SHIFT+DRAG draws lines constrained to the X or Y axis.

SHIFT+CLICK draws a straight line segment from the last point to the new point.
The segments are added to the current line until the SHIFT is released. 
Applying SHIFT+CLICK again starts a new line.

ALT+CLICK activates the color picker

CTRL+CLICK moves the layer

Hope that helps.

Attached a quick example of particle generated mesh rendered in D|S.

Looks like the subsurf modifier has not been applied. Go into OBJECT MODE then click APPLY under the modifier tab in the buttons menu.

This should sort out the problem, if it does not PM me and we'll go from there.

Good work on the water!

pwCatch should do the trick for determining which surfaces receive shadows. It is a commercial item but is reasonably priced so you may want to take a look at the store entry over on DAZ.

You may want to take a look at this render engine:

http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php

I've been using it for a couple of weeks now to expand my rendering options for D|S scenes and am very pleased with the results. It supports masking renders as one of the built in presets which would make it very simple to do the two render composite R.H. mentioned in his post.

Hey,

Just spotted this post.....If you are interested in trying Blender, I have a two part tutorial that will show you the basics of how to model clothes for use in D|S and Poser.

http://www.4shared.com/account/dir/5124159/75b23460/sharing.html

"Simple Modeling in Blender Parts 1 & 2"  are the tutorials you'll want to look at first.