Quote - Yes, applying a map to reflection Colour will exclude actual reflections. That's why it's faster that way - no rays to trace.

whew, glad to know I'm not off my rocker. I was pretty certain that was the case until yesterday.

Awesome. That's exactly what I was looking for. I'll give it a try.

Quote - yeah that's how it should work and does work with say a metal reflection so it should work similar i haven't played with glass settings much yet but reflections i've been playing lots with them trying to get different looks to them

I had always thought one overrode the other! I have no idea why I thought that. But I thought a reflection map just gave you "fake" reflections.
Huh! You learn something new every day.
Now, where can I find some and how do I use them effectively?

(and thanks so much for the help so far, I really appreciate it).

so a reflection map won't override the natural reflections the glass would have?
In other words, I can use a reflection map, have someone standing next to the glass, and their reflection would still appear?

I'm trying with glossy plastic. I want to avoid reflection maps because I want it to actually reflect things present in the scenes realistically.

Thanks!

So, if I name each shading domain, the textures won't be called "default_material" any more, and would instead be named for part they are placed on?

I'll give that a try and see what happens.

When I try, even as a .tif, many of the textures are just colored squares, or they won't rewrap correctly in other programs. Many just don't seem to export at all. Additionally, it asks me to name each one, and there are sometimes over 100 of them.

"Baker" seems to be my only recourse, unless someone has some bit of arcane wisdom that can help...

Thanks for the info on carrara lounge. I'm waiting for my confirmation e-mail as I post this. I'll look into that contest.

Okay, here's what I discovered worked: I exported them out of DOGA as *.x files (Direct3d) and then imported them to Carrara, upped the size since they come in basically with zero size values, and then saved them as obj files with Carrara's Daz Studio preset save format.
You do lose the spec and bump maps, but I'm working on recreating those.

Excellent! I'll give that a try and we'll see if it works.

ah, I've been rendering to viewport all this time. I'll give your suggestions a try. Thanks!

Drop the background into Daz Studio. On the load tab, there's an icon on top of a little sun with a little mountain. That allows you to add backgrounds right into DAZ Studio, which will eliminate that effect. Now DAZ will constantly try to center the background and compress the entire image into the viewing area. You can either set the render to active viewport via render settings (like you've done), or you can just make a large, flat plane and paste the background on that.

I don't know enough about photoshop to know why the gray is appearing. I use GIMP 2 for my postwork. I assume you're dropping it in as a layer in the background. The opacity there might be an issue.

At first I had a lot of problems with this. I'd get an error every time I attempted to render, it would take forever to load saved files etc. I've got the new beta and things are running better. However, it seems that heavy use of shaders still causes it to crash, and I can't render files from previous versions. The beta is much more stable, however, and I'd advise upgrading to it if you HAVE to go to 2.2. You can access it off a link on their forums.

Orbital -- "Awakening" 3 pts.

Daffodilbaggins -- "Dreaming of Middle Eath" 2 pts.

Twopynts -- "Sunrise in Florida" 1 pt.

Great stuff!