Quote - I turned the gloss of the hair way down from the default that Reality had set.  I let it render for 40 hours.  My question is, even after all this time, there are still red speckles in the shadow area of the hair.  How can I get rid of that?

In theory these will clear up "eventually". That eventuality is too far away for me, so I have to resort to post work to remove them. I don't like doing this, as, unless there are only a few isolated specks, it's very hard, and in some cases impossible, to do it without it being detectable.

I believe this to be a particular problem when transparency is used. It's exacerbated by red/gold colours (if you changed the hair to a darker colour, I believe you will not have the problem—but of course, this is not an acceptable solution artistically). I only get this problem with red/blonde hair (with transparency) and high polish metals (e.g. jewellery) next to the skin—it's worse with gold. Nothing to do with trans maps in the case of metals, though, and there's a comprehensible reason for it; it also tends to clear up, whereas the hair problem never seems to—it seems like an asymptotic process.

This is all interesting to know. I haven't haven't anywhere near as many crashes since I upgraded to a 64bit machine (with 16 gig) but I don't often do heavy scenes (man!). However, I was trying something with one of Mec4D's hair tests and that really slowed me down, but those are like 100s of K poly models. Didn't crash though. I'm hoping 4.5 will be better generally with memory management and viewport response, but I'm letting others do the testing! Not that I can use something that doesn't have Reality or Gen X.

By the way, is Cath (Mec4D) posting at DAZ, does anyone know? I couldn't see anything, but who can find anything there as things are. It would be great if she was posting here.

Quote - Also just noticed I have Gen4 in on my hdd (bosses wife keeps buying me content/tools - even bought me Cararra 8 Pro!), just tried running it but it crashed transferring, need to play some more... Abi.

I'd say it's worth upgrading to Gen X. If you have your original order info for Gen 4 there is an upgrade for $12 at DAZ.

Quote - This one's for whoever knows the info; but, I think I have my issue with my render speeds and it sort of has something to do with textures.

Ordinarily, when rendering with 3Delight, I rely heavily on shaders of all sorts.  Uber hair for hair, pwsurface2 for skin, glass shaders, metal shaders.  Anything that I think they can improve the looks of.

My question is this.. do shaders help, hinder or have no effect on Lux render times?

Well, of course, the DAZ shaders you mention for cannot be imported by Reality as such. Where possible they are translated into the analogous Reality/Lux shaders that you see in Reality (e.g Top Coat, and of course metal and glass). In my experience these shaders only effect render times to the extent of their glossiness, reflectivity, etc. In other words, there are no special considerations that would not apply to any settings you make in Reality yourself. The use of hyper-real glass, or a material acting pretty much as a mirror of a significant size, will tend to have an enormous impact, as you would imagine.

The appropriate use of lighting is what has the most impact on render times generally, which is why Paolo has put so much effort into training users in the correct use of it.

Gen X works very well in my opinion, if your result looks like crap you are definitely missing something. I did one about half an hour ago (took me 10 mins at most) and it was near perfect. One thing you may miss is that when you apply it to Genesis you have to dial up the shape the morph was intended for as well as your transferred morph. E.g. if it's a morph for M4, dial the M4 shape in Genesis and then your Gen X morph.

If the body morph you are transferring uses dialled morphs (rather than a custom FBM) you might consider unchecking nipple and navel morphs so they are not transferred. These tend to be better done using Genesis nipple and navel morphs. In the case of nipples the transferred morphs do not always align with the texture.

Quote - SuperBT and bobvan, you are most welcome.  I hated the thought of losing all that informaiton.  In looking at some of the posts not all the images show up.  I think you have to be logged in to see them and of course the archrived stuff you can't log in, it set to view only.  It's a shame we lost seeing some great images..

The images are still there, but seeing them is very fiddly. For example in the post it will say something like:

<img border=0 src="postimages/image_1_3355038.jpg"width=150>

Take the bit in quotes (but leaving off the quotes): postimages/origimage_1_3355038.jpg and append this to http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/

E.g:

http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/postimages/origimage_1_3355038.jpg

Quote - Thanks Sharky.

Just to see what I might be getting into, I took a peek at GenX at 32 bones, not on sale, and you have to get the M4/V4 shapes for genesis (which is on sale for $11 right now)

Aside from having to redo characters, is there any benefit to GenX as opposed to picking up the Genesis morph bundle, on slae for $16 and change right now?

I've been using Gen X for some time, and my view is that it's not—or at least not now—of great use for body morphs (if you have the Genesis goodies) since it's possible and even easy to create good body morphs natively in Genesis which are superior to many Gen 4 purchased morphs. The exception to this would be the more unusual or extreme morphs (for instance, G4 creature morphs if you have them, and some characters) as these are generally not possible without custom morphs or special morph sets.

Where it becomes more valuable is with face/head character morphs, because I think these are much more difficult, not only because they express personality above all other physical features, but also because I find it harder to create good faces in comparison to good bodies.

What I would say is ask yourself whether you have a lot of G4 and earlier Gen X compatible characters that you particularly like that you would like to reproduce in Genesis. It also means that you can still buy Gen 4 characters for their morphs as well as their textures, even if you exclusively use Genesis (which I do). Most of the facial morphs that I use come from Gen X conversions, and the great thing, of course, is that they can be dialled (unlike simple injections) to whatever degree you like and mixed with others.

To be fair, despite what I have said, I still use some of the body morphs I converted, but I'm finding I use them less and less now that I have all, or most of, the Genesis morphs (Evolution, Muscularity, V5 and M5).

If anything, now that DAZ Studio 4 Pro is free it is less like those "free" things that you describe than the original free DAZ Studio used to be. Last year the basic Studio was free, but in order to "create content" and do more advanced tasks you needed to pay a not inconsiderable sum for upgrades—to Advanced and Pro. This is no longer the case, so you are getting a formerly "not free" program for nothing, rather than a shoddy made-to-give-away thing. That makes it a different paradigm, I think.

Of course there are costs attached (as you accept) because you will buy content, but that is true of any paid-for program of this kind. You could say the same thing about a free artists easel—you will have to buy, and keep buying, paints, brushes, paper or canvas if you want to use it for its intended purpose. (Although, unlike paints, your 3D materials are not consumed.) However, that is all you will be required to pay for, and of course, you need not buy any of these from DAZ (although you likely will—that is their gameplan).

None of the paid-for plugins are essential, and in any case, they are created by 3rd parties, and DAZ may not necessarily benefit from sales of these (e.g. Reality).

Wow, thanks, grylin. Really naturalistic looking work. That's a great render of a truly realitistic character with great personality. I really appreciate the generosity of artists such as yourself—you really make the 3D world go round!

Well I wouldn't say it's died the death, exactly—the store seems to function well enough (although there is very little I feel I want to buy at the moment) and the forum works after a fashion. However it's not very appetizing—fine if you like consumer complaint forums, though.

Quote - thanks for the reply.  Since I don't know how to do materials in Luxrender, I Googled  :)

I found this Black Leather material, woohoo!  Just what I needed.   Problem for me is figuring out now how to apply it to the material zones I want it on.  Back to Google!

http://www.luxrender.net/lrmdb2/en/material/view/24

I think this can perhaps be done by editing the .lxo file as Reality doesn't support the procedurals in Lux. I know next to nothing about it, but Cwichura is probably your person for that. I'm not sure if he is monitoring this thread at the moment, but I think he is active on the DAZ forum.

Quote - Does reality support the Shader Mixer/Builder shaders?  I had a character in poser, brought to Daz, but it was using a black leather procedural material.  I found a decent leather material for the Shader Mixer, applied it, but in Reality it seems to come out just flat black?

If not, is there a way to do a similar leather type of material on a materiall zone?

No, procedural textures intended for 3Delight rendering will not work in Luxrender, which has its own materials and procedural textures (and the latter are not available from Reality). Reality translates shader information as far as it is able to channels available to Luxrender, but you are limited to the material types, and their parameters, that you can see as options in Reality.

In order to get a leather texture you will require the appropriate image map, specular, bump map, etc. Luxrender via Reality is capable of recreating a highly realistic leather texture with some or all of these, but not procedurally. Have a look at the material parameters that Reality has imported, and I think you will find that it is just a diffuse colour with its attendant parameters.

If you are rendering in Reality/Luxrender, you can forget all about those fancy shader settings in DAZ and work on your shaders in Reality using its conversions as a starting point. Or if it is something like metal or glass, just change the material type to that. (By the way, if your metal surface has a map, make sure the metal material is set to custom so that the map is used. Custom metals with maps look incredibly good.) However, I can't imagine how you can make a convincing leather without maps as leather has a definite texture—without that it is just going to look something like plastic or rubber.

Yes, of course, you are right. The sphere isn't imported, unless you rename it, I presume, although the image itself can be rendered.

I use the cube mainly on open sets such as you describe. I have one made to a useful shape, size, material and location and saved as a prop. I can easily re-size its various dimensions to suit. I much prefer these semi-open to rooms as you have so little elbow room when setting up—in some cases there's hardly room to swing a mesh light. Yes, you can turn things on and off or make them transparent, but it ends up being very fiddly. It drives me nuts. On the other hand, I rarely do long or wide angle shots so partial sets suit me very well.

This is my first proper go with Michael 5 (although there is a bit of Michael 4 and Gen X imported morphs in him).

Click for bigger, of course.

The fact that the topic are listed in creation order—the creation of the topic, that is, rather than last post order, makes the forum stunningly un-user-friendly. I have never used a forum like this and I can't imagine either anyone deciding a forum should be like this or a forum being like this by default. I find my mind being truly boggled by it.

Anyway, I'm using the View New Posts and  View Today's Active Topics links as the only way of keeping sane while using it (I think these only appear when you are logged in).

As for tracking threads that I have participated in, I use Your Public Profile link which appears on the top right at http://www.daz3d.com/forums when logged in. From your profile page you can more easily discover whether your posts have received replies using the View all posts by this member link (this member being you, of course).

I've used the Zendesk (because I was not allowed into the PC forum due to a permissions setting) and I got a response and they fixed the problem. Not that the PC forum was of much interest as it was full of the same complaints as the public forums.

The bad installer problem is due to a PHP error, I am told. It adds an error message to your file! Otherwise the file is fine. You may have heard that there is a little utility to fix this. I've only had one file with this problem, but I have not bought much since the store re-opened. May be this is a different problem you are having, though. I understood that it was happening with older installers—surprised to hear it is happening to the new zips. The utility is linked in this thread: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/865/