I went the Amex -> Paypal -> Vue route and it's worked fine every time.... maybe that's why it's not so much on their priority list these days.

congrats  - some excellent work featured here!

Quote - i need help in learning how to use daz studio...please..

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=40198

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=23870

http://www.amazon.com/Figures-Characters-Avatars-Official-Beautiful/dp/1598638165/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235590126&sr=8-1

Easiest way to fix pokethrough: shut off visibility on the offending body part.  if all of a hip or thigh is going to be hidden behind a pair of pants then simply turning off the little eyeball ensures there will be no pokethrough.  Rule of thumb - if you cannot see it it should not be visable (unless it's casting shadows into the scene).

The 'vague brushstrokes' may be a shadow bias problem.  Try increasing the shadow bias on your lights that cast shadows just a little bit.

On postwork - DAZ Studio does not do volumetric or atmospherics (yet). Any sort of atmospheric perspective or volumetric lighting will have to be done in post.  Beyond that, you can get very good and realistic renders out of the 3Delight engine, with praatice and knowledge.  Much of my postwork consists of combining seperate lighting passes (out of convenience more than anything else) and adjusting the levels of the render.  D|S does tend to render Dark.

Regarding 'realism' great lighting is the best place to start.  CG generally looks 'CG' because there is not enough light in the scene.  Also mastering the surfaces panel is key.  After that get Omni's HSS or pwSurface2 and learn to use those.

A 'shader' as has been said, is the code that tells the render engine how to render a surface.  Different shaders expose different functionality and have different default modes.  Generally more 'advanced' shaders expose more and more complex functionality - all of which will increase render times, of course :)

Hope that helps.

--michael

Here is another way to go about it:

ctrl-P to select perspective view.  Select several lights, cameras and or scene elements in the scene tab by ctrl clicking on them.  Ctrl-F then will move the perspective camera so they are all in view.  If you're on a Mac, substitute cmd for ctrl above.

--michael

nice render!

thanks Chipp - you rock!

Denizen from Ant Farm @ DAZ

you can definitely get close to that with pwEffect

the shader engines are completely different.  you can do some procedurals with pwEffect and the Eilir freeware package will let you do some node based things, but no direct translation.

Eilir:
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=61508

the most important thing to remember with glass is turn "Multiply Specular by Opacity" to off - you'll find it in the 'Specular" section of the advanced surfaces tab.

GREAT Choice!  

DAZ|studio does not do motion blur at this time.  The 3Delight engine is capable of it but the feature is not turned on in the current 2.x release of studio.  Photoshop will be your friend here.

thanks Jen!

no problems at all -- D|S will render as many buckets simultaniously as you have cores.

--michael