Is there a skinny little bar on the right side of the window with an arrow pointing toward the center on it (the arrow is small and in the vertical center of the bar). If so, then you accidentally collapsed that side bar. Just click the little arrow and it will expand back into place. If you didn't collapse it, it's also possible that you accidentally dragged the width of the sidebar to be hidden. Ti fix that, move your mouse slowly toward the skinny bar until you see the cursor change. You should then be able to drag the skinny bar toward the center. This will expose your sidebar.

If I were a betting man, I'd say it's the uber stuff. That killed me the first few tries for me with IRAY. I wasn't using GPU and we are talking hours to get fuzzy pictures on a 4ghz machine, lol.

I would start out deleting any unnecessary stuff, like any atmosphere related stuff. Just load the props. Maybe start with just one big prop. Select each of it's textures in the Surfaces tab and then find the Iray uber Base shader which should be pretty easy to find (I've moved mine, so I have no idea where it was hiding originally). Do a render, then keep adding pieces. I suspect you'll either find the culprit or you'll end up with a complete scene that renders reasonably fast. If the water shaders or some of the more complicated things don't translate nicely using the default iray shader, you will have to learn how to fix them yourself, or maybe like someone said earlier...there might be iray specific versions of the model or it's shaders. Of course, if this is a Poser model, it's definitely not going to be IRAY ready out of the box.

Laurie makes another good point about displacement. You can easily end up with a model that simply won't fit in your GPU's memory if you turn up the # of subdivisions really high (sometimes you have to get them high to reflect the underlying texture's pixel density)...really high isn't really a big number, necessarily. When that happens, it jumps doing to CPU only and can take forever. I'm going to guess this is related to the parameters, subdivision Level, but it's been a while since I played with that... Anyway, I doubt anyone would release a product set high enough to overload a 4 gig card out of the box and it doesn't sound like you changed things...but, it's a good point to be aware of.

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.

If you want to update but aren't 100% you'll stay, make a backup of 4.8 before you do (more importantly, back up those installers that you got with DIM or however you installed them...including the plugins) Once you install 4.9, unless you manually ensure otherwise, your old install is overwritten.

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. I've tried the fixes that they mention in the forums (various changes to the shaders), but it doesn't help. So, I am still using 4.8 and will do so until the ones I use are updated. I'm finding connect doesn't work with my two computer setup (1 for creating scenes, and 1 for rendering them) so I am mostly happy with 4.8, except the rare occasion where IRAY crashes DS. I don't plan to buy any connect only content until DAZ makes it easier to share connect content over a local network (right now, you have to install the content on each machine, which is a hassle I don't want to mess with).

You don't need RSR conversion with Daz Studio. At least, not with 4.8 (and probably 4.9). Strangely, the latest version of Poser that I owned didn't understand those files, but DS did (I stopped with the version of poser before the one that was recently released)

It's pretty much the same as with windows, except that when you drag folder A on top of Folder B, the mac replaces B. It does that because .app files are actually folders that the OS pretends are just files that run when you click on them...and...to update an app, you usually just drag the new one on top of the old. No installer unless you use something from a weird company...like adobe.

So, the big trick is, like Razor42 says, is merging the two. I recommended BetterZip in the other thread, but there are probably others that allow you to extract zip files. Just make sure that they will allow you to extract into a pre-existing directory. A lot of the more common ones try to be smart and create a sister directory named almost the same as the one you chose but with something like "-1" after it.

The other big gotcha is that DAZ zips up the content into a directory called "content", which doesn't need to be there in your runtime. So, let's say you have your runtime called DS4, you would have directories like DS4/data, DS4/people, DS4/Runtime, inside...and not something like DS4/content/people, etc. So, if you are extracting DAZ products manually, you'll need to extract them, and then zip them back up. It's a bit of a hassle, but if you learn to use the command line, you can do what I do and drop all of your zip files into one directory and it will extract everything into a single subdirectory. Then, you can do any file manipulation (I move my stuff around before merging into my main runtime) before doing one big zip and then one big extraction.

I let DIM do all of my DAZ purchases, but anything I get from renderosity or runtimedna goes through my little script and it makes life almost as easy as DIM.

As best as I can tell, the python is just for showing/hiding stuff, which you should be able to do manually (of course, there might be something weird that I am not thinking of). The rest of the stuff should work fine, I would imagine. I haven't loaded too much stuff from poser runtimes into DS lately, but everything that I have has been fine. You just have to manually tweak the materials, which can take some time if there are lots of pieces. I would message the creator and ask if the python scripts are necessary or just convenience. Look to see if they have any freebies that you can load into DS to get an idea of the quality of their work and to see how it looks in DS.

I have changed computers a few times and just either copied the data or used the same physical disk (my current setup is an external thunderbolt disk). I recently bought a windows computer that uses my Mac's runtime via network drive and I don't have any problems...except that I have a bunch of old stuff that I'll never use again taking up disk-space.

If you are talking about installing DAZ studio content on a modern Mac computer (OS X), then it's pretty straight forward. I have never heard of rendoinstall, so I just use plain ol' zip. I personally have a bash script that unzips recursively all zip files in a particular directory into a subfolder and then I move stuff around because I hate the default locations, but if you just want to install something from renderosity or a similar type of place, you could just do the following:

Download the tool BetterZip (it is very similar to winzip). The version I have (which is old, so it might have changed) allows me to select where to extract stuff. I just point the extraction to my DS4 runtime. The version of BetterZip I use is 1.8.3. At some point, I downloaded 2 and couldn't figure out how to get it to extract onto an existing directory (it kept doing the stupid thing of creating a new directory with a similar name) so I stuck with the old version. If you find the new version still is a PITA, there should be an archive on their website for downloading old versions.

I haven't noticed this before, but since I haven't really shopped here much lately, it could be that I just haven't paid attention and that it's been going on for weeks. However, right now, chrome does not consider your HTTPS content to be satisfactorily encrypted, which is making me reconsider whether I want to finish my purchase or not.

When I use an encrypted site, my address bar should show a green lock indicating that the site is truly secure (using chrome browser). Yours does not show this, instead, it is plain white. At the very least, you are loading content that isn't encrypted (your renderosity logo on this page, and then some advertisements from filterforge on the checkout page, both of which are loaded with the unencrypted http protocol. )

Most things appear to have been done properly, so I'm guessing it's just some recent changes that broke things, but it's a very serious breach of trust and indicative of either sloppy work or the work of an inexperienced programmer both of which make me nervous to enter credit card stuff.

Render rewards aren't related to prime? I always that it was one of the perks of being a prime member. I guess I was mistaken!

I've never used the trackpad with poser, but I tried one at work and went back to the mouse. I do know some folks that love them, though. I'm not really sure how either would be any better with poser and software like that but maybe someone else can chime in with more experience.

I used to use PP2014 on a new retina IMAC (and a 27 inch iMac before that) and it worked fine. If they've fixed the issue with reality and el capitan, then you should have no trouble with anything that I used. I have switched to DAZ Studio, and wish that I had an nVidia card, but otherwise, I'm fairly happy. The only "Add-ons" that I'm aware of that don't work are some really old python scripts that use TKinter for the interface which apparently is missing on the version of Python that comes on the mac for some reason. But, those are from years ago.

If you use Mac at work, then you'll be much happier not having to switch back and forth from mac to windows. I was a huge window's nerd before I switched (built my own machine, etc), and now I'm completely at a loss when I sit down to try and help folks with their windows machines. Nothing is familiar to me anymore...but, then again, it's probably been over 10 years since I really used one of those machines.

If you are getting an iMac, I recommend getting a wired keyboard if you don't plan to need it far away. My previous imac had a wireless keyboard and it went through batteries like crazy. The wired mouse is horrible, though, so get the wireless one. It's really nice. Also, keep your machine in good shape and you can get a really good trade-in value many years later. With discounts (got it during the thanksgiving sale season last year, so they were offering some extra incentives for trade-ins), I think I got over 1000 off of the price of the new one, and the machine I traded in was 3 or 4 years old.

Ah. I don't know what the grab bag is, but it probably lost Out of Touch a sale or two, since I was worried that the site was messed up and the items are no longer 1/2 off. Oh well. 

Hi, 

I'm logged in as me, and those items still show as if I hadn't purchased them (please note that I own both of the right most items in this picture, and yet both show as purchasable in the index and in the item pages as well if I were to click on them, which isn't shown). I assure you that I'm not making this up. And yeah, OOT is Out of Touch. They prefix their stuff with OOT, so I assumed it was obvious. Hopefully that wasn't too difficult to translate.