I originally installed it over two years ago, then did an upgrade and did another install just over a year ago, but when i last loaded up ds it went through the meta data (can't remember exactly what it said) im guessing there might have been an update that kicked in the content management.

Noticed that all the shaders in the uber base folder do the same, as well as all the files in the Iray folder, i have no idea why this has decided to do this, i really hate the "smart content" on ds, it makes upgrading to a new machine a complete pain (Btw i upgraded over a year ago, it was a pain to fix then, and it's a pain to fix now)

i use a plane instead of lights, with the emissive set set high and to white then the cut out to 0.00001 this makes the plane invisible but still casts light but doesn't show in reflections....btw the emissive value is cranked higher than normal to compensate for the transparency in the cutout.

and booost the lumins to 5million 50000 isn't that high if that is too high half it, and adjust from there

Hide the room and test the render, see if the light works, if it does then something in the room is probably obscuring the light or camera or both, use the preview camera to look around the interior of your scene in texture mode, making sure the render camera is set to visible. you will then see if anything obscures it.... if it still is not working and nothing is obscuring and it doesn't light without the room visible then we can go from there.

They are all G8F textures, the eye mats are only for the iris, not the other mat zones, im guessing this is because the vendors think it is not necessary to add the other material zones into the eye material, so when you change the eye colour you only need to change the iris, not anything else in the eye. The problem is if you used an eye from someone else then apply the eye mat from a different vendor it only changes the iris textures, NOT the rest of the eye material zone textures. and i don't use G3F as i started using daz only a year ago, so missed the G3F bandwagon. as for pressing control on selected zones has no effect unless you are applying the entire texture set for the character whilst only selecting the eye, and this doesnt give you the option of the different colours, unless done afterwards.

Nice tutorial, although i think you need to say that you need to make a copy of the base mat and desaturate it, as most hair content i have is coloured and changing the base colour just mixes your new colour and the hair texture colour, ie hair texture is blue and i change the base colour to red, i have purple hair.

M4 base is part of the free freak content over at daz at the moment, and the Daz installer says it's installed it, but it has only saved it into the runtime/libraries section of the "Daz studio formats" content along with alot, and i mean alot of other content that i cannot look at unless i browse from file explorer and drag and drop. There are NO duf files attached to M4 or anything else in the runtime folder.

In daz install manager M4 Base StudioCF installs:-

/People/Michael 4/Materials/M4 Sample-Res/!All_Mapless.ds /People/Michael 4/Materials/M4 Sample-Res/!All_Mapless.ds.png /People/Michael 4/Materials/M4 Sample-Res/!Body_BoxerBriefs.ds /People/Michael 4/Materials/M4 Sample-Res/!Body_BoxerBriefs.ds.png /ReadMe's/pics/dazlogo.jpg /ReadMe's/pics/ps_pe074.jpg /ReadMe's/ProductLists/Michael4BaseLIST.txt /ReadMe's/readme_7877_1_Michael4Base.html /Runtime/Support/DAZ_3D_7877_Michael_4_Base_StudioCF.dsx

Which has no M4..... but the Michael 4 Base powerloader installs M4 into the runtime/Characters/Daz People folder. Not where it should be in the My Daz Library folder. nice mess daz with your OWN content...duh

Thank you 3doutlaw. I have noticed that Daz are pretty stupid, They install there own content that is made for Poser ".cr2" in the "daz studio formats" content tree making them invisible. BUT all of my poser content ".cr2" in the "Poser formats" content tree are visible. Why on earth does Daz install there own content somewhere it can't be accessed.... totally stupid. now im going to manually move the damned folder......

Sounds a bit strange, 8 mins to load a naked G8F, i say this because my pc, pre xmas 2019 was a intel 1st gen i7 2.2ghz with 8gbs ram, Gtx970 (4gb vram) and 3Hds totalling 2.5tbs, and if you look in my gallery i was rendering 2 G8Fs with different textures etc. i don't think the gtx750 helps as 2gbs on the graphics card is still an issue in daz, as my new machine has inherited the old Gtx 970 and even though it has 4gbs (3.5gbs usable) it still hits issues with texture sizes filling up the memory. have you checked to see what is the max size of the virtual HD allocation? as this might help speed things up a little. try loading up a blank G8F with no textures attached to see if that helps, i know the morphs can bloat, but not to that amount, my scenes never get that high on only one G8F.

Noticing an issue with one of my Bought characters, seams the files that remove and add morphs are not working as intended, ie removing morphs just adds them. this also follows throught to saving shapes as the sliders are present on G8F, and are activated even though they are inactive. not sure how to stop this yet....weird bug...

oh and you cant "Zero selected items shape" on the head to zero all the head morphs. only works on the full body.

Right after having a play around, subd settings did nothing, neither did changing the materials, but changing the setting "fit to mode" in the "parameters" tab, to "Auto follow transforms" changes the shape of the artifacts, Im guessing that Daz studio has a bug, and there is no fix for this.

and I notice that when I turn the opacity off (done individually for each mat zone) this occurs, I have no idea what this is? there shouldn't be anything showing on the head.

I checked all of the opacity settings, on both hairs, It seams the skull cap is intersecting the head and causing issues, not sure why this is happening, will be doing more tests, and adding the names of hair I am having trouble with