Can you get the base product to work?

"Vibrant Sporty Pigtails" is a product from Silver, not OOT.   According to the readme file, the product should be in:

People -> Genesis 2 Female -> Hair -> OOT Sporty Pigtails Hair -> Vibrant<br></br>

If it is not there or some of the the files are missing, you need contact Silver.

I have purchased a large number of OOT DAZ products here at Renderosity. I have not had problems getting them to work in DAZ.

Which products are you having problems with?

PC or Mac?

Here are a few tutorials. Most of these are old, and appearance of surface pane has changed, but most of what they say are still valid:

Surface pane:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~neilvpose/ds-settings.htm

How to make custom MATs for DAZ Studio:
http://mtdremer.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-Custom-MATs-for-DAZ-Studio

Fixing Skin Surface Settings in Daz Studio - Largely about fixing Poser material to work in DS.
http://www.calida3d.com/tutorials6.shtml

My simple summary:

These are just general guidelines.

Diffusion:

This is what controls the response of the surface to diffuse light.  Usually there is a 2D image and a color. For most objects this controls a lot of the appearance. You don't have to have a 2D image. You can just set the color, but then the object will look very uniform and not realistic. The 2D image allows for color/patern variation over the surface. Usually the diffusion strength will be 100%, except when using SSS on skin, where diffusion may be as low as 50%.

There is something called the UVs which map the 2D images on to the 3D object surfaces. Some products have "templates" available that show you where the UVs are on the 2D maps. A big issue with making texture maps is that the UVs warp around the 3D object and at some places there will be seams where the maps meet. It is important that the texure maps line up at these seams, otherwise the seam will be visible in the render.

Specular:

While diffuse light comes from and is reflected off surfaces in all directions, Specular light comes from a single direction and is reflected off in a single direction. Specular light is handled separately in 3Delight. Most primitive lights emit both diffuse and specular light, but you can set them to only emit specular or only emit diffuse light. Specular light is what produces the shinny spots on a persons skin when you take pictures in bright sun light or using bright flash.  Different shaders treat specular differently in detail. There is a glossiness parameter that controls how shiny the suface looks. High glossiness means highly glossy surface and small, sharply defined specular highlights on curved surfaces. Specular is usally white light, but many PAs use light blue or some other color.

 
There can be a strength map, a B&W 2D image. This strength map is frequently put in the color rather than using it as a strength map in the specular strength, but you will see PAs doing it both ways. The strenght map modifies the shaders build in model of how the surface response to specular light.

Some shaders have 2 different specular settings. This can be used to model more complex surfaces, like skin, that may be very glossy in some places and not as glossy in others. Most shaders allow strength maps on glossiness parameter too, but you don't see this used very often.

Surface hight adjustment:

Bump, displacement and normal maps are used to model small surface features without creating polygons to model them. 

A bump map is a B&W map the is used to simulate small hight variations in the surface by making places darker or lighter. If you find a PA using a color bump map, that just means they were too lazy to convert the map to B&W.

A displacement map is a B&W image similar to bump map, but displacement maps actually move the surface points up and down along normals to the surface in the rendering program. This makes displacement maps more expensive to render, but more accurate in modeling.

A normal map is similar to a displacement map but it is a color image with the RGB values corresponding to X, Y and Z displacements of surface points. This allows more complex and realistic variations in the surface because you can move points in 3 direction rather than just one. Normal maps are more rarely used and they can be very expensive in rendering.

SSS

SSS stands for subsurface scattering. It is for modeling surfaces like skin that have a semi-tranparent suface layer and deeper colored layers.  This is complicated subject and different shaders do it differently.   The one think I would point out is that DAZ Studio and Poser support of SSS are completely incompatible. If you have a poser character that has normal and SSS skin materials, the SSS is probably Poser SSS material. The Poser SSS material will apply in DAZ Studio, but the results are usually poor.

Reflection

In addition to specular shaders have reflection settings. If you want to make a mirror or very mirror like surface, you need to use reflection. You can provide a color image of what you want the surface to be reflecting or you can let the reflection ray trace a reflection of the other objects in the scene. In the later case, you need to have other objects in the scene so there is something to reflect, like a sky dome.

Shaders is very broad topic.  Can you be more specific in what you are interested in.

DAZ Studio comes with a number of shaders, the default, humanSurface, UberSurface, AoA SSS shader. Many products/freebies for DAZ Studio use some of these shaders. There are also many custom shaders available. Finally there is the shader builder that lets you create your own shader.

Are you interested in trying to understand how to adjust material using the common shaders? Do you want to learn how to create your own shaders in shader builder?

There are some commented samples of scripts at:

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/scripting/api_reference/samples/start

There is also a thread in the DAZ Forum on scripting with the title "DAZ Studio 4.x Scripting Documentation".  If you search for that title in the DAZ Forums you should find it.

There is the Mimic Live plugin which does lip syncing on 64 bit windows, but is not available for Mac.

The item OP is referring to is FWSA Stacia.

Ah. I have her too. She works fine for me. I searched in the DAZ store as well as here for her, but I guess she had already been removed from the DAZ store.

I am not sure what "stacia" is, but that file is part of the "Genesis 2 Female Head Morphs". There is also a "Genesis 2 Female Body Morphs" you will need to do much with Genesis 2 Female. There is a bundle "Genesis 2 Female(s) Morphs Bundle" that includes both.These are all in the DAZ store.

There are corresponding morph bundles for Genesis 2 Male.

Did you buy Reality 2 or Reality 4?  Reality 4 was just recently released.

The OpenCL version of LuxRender I believe is to support hardware assisted render using your graphics card.  You need to have a graphics card that supports OpenCL.  This hardware assisted render has been an experimental feature in LuxRender. That means it is buggy. If you are just starting out use the version without OpenCL support. You can always try out the OpenCL version later.

I never used DS3. I actually started with DS4.5, but in my experience there has been a significant reduction in render time in DS between DS4.5 and the latest release of DS4.6. I think most of this improvement has come from newer versions of 3Delight that are packaged with the latest releases of DS.  The bulk of this improvement was maybe a year ago or so. I remember re-rendering some big scenes and noting a significant reduction.

The AoA Advanced Ambient light can also provide environment lighting with occlusion and shorter render times than than the UberEnv lights. The AoA advanced spot and distant lights can speed up renders and give you more control over how surfaces are lighted.  The AoA lights are not part of DS. They are separate products that you have to buy, but I believe they are only available for DS4.6+. The AoA lights have a bit of learning curve. They are more complicated to use (well, maybe not more complicated than UberEnv2).

Even if you are not using any Genesis or Genesis 2 figures, you can take advantage of these improvements.

This is some bug in the AoA SSS shader used by the V6 skin materials.

You can get this from running 2 DAZ Studio windows at the same time. You should not do that because both window use the same temporary directory for compiled shaders.

On a PC you can usually fix this by going to C:users/AppDataRoamingDAZ3DStudio4tempshadersbickyard and deleting everything in that directory.Then re-render. It will recompile the shaders and that should fix this problem.

If that does not work, save you scene and exit DS.  Use the task manager to wait until the DAZ Studio process quits.  If you have a small scene loaded, this will be almost immediate. If you have a large scene loaded, this can take a long time, 5 or 10 minutes. Start DAZ Studio up, open you scene and re-render it.  That always fixes it for me.

Quote - 1).I Assume I get a genesis "base"model free with DS

what do I need to get a "Fully morphing" genesis Male& Female?

There actually are two different version of genesis.  The original Genesis, now sometimes called Genesis 1,  is a single base figure that morphs into both male and female versions.  Genesis 2 has separate male and female base figures.  You get the both the Genesis 1 and 2 base figures free with DAZ 4.x.

To do much with Genesis 1 you need the "Genesis Evolution: Morph Bundle". That contains both the head and body morphs.

To do much with Genesis 2 you need the "Genesis 2 Female(s) Morphs Bundle" and "Genesis 2 Male Morphs Bundle".  The bundles include both the head and body morphs.

There are other specialized morph bundles too, but those ones are required for lots of characters.

Most new products coming out today are for Genesis 2, except for some creatures on Genesis 1.

Quote - 2). I have some old V4 morphs ++ figure face morphs that I like.
will I have to recreate them from scratch  with genesis?

You will still be able to use V4 figures in DAZ 4.x. She still works fine.

You can transfer the body/head shape to Genesis 1 or 2 with "Gen X". The V4 skins will work on Genesis 1 with no change. For Genesis 2 you will need "Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female" to use the skin mats on genesis 2. You will also need to change them into DUF format, which you can do by applying them to Victoria 4 and saving them as a material preset.

But you don't need to transfer anything. You can just use Victoria 4.2 in DS.

Quote - 3). Am I correct in assuming that any really old Daz Figures such as Mike 2 will not be able to be opened in DS 4.x even if saved as a DS scene from my old version of DS 2.3??

I'm not sure about this. Don't have any really old figures or scenes saved in really old versions.

What platform and OS? How much RAM?

I saw lots of crashes during render when I was using the 32bit version on a 32bit OS with 2GB RAM.

Does it crash on every render? or just big renders?

I have been doing lots of renders with no problems with the most recent update. I'm using the 64bit version on Win7 Prof 64bit.

If you have been rendering with no problems for some time, and then DAZ started crashing all the time, I would check if there is some hardware issue. Rendering in DAZ stresses your computer more than most applications.

On a PC check the system logs for errors.  If you have any hardware diagnostics, try them.

Quote - Well it looks like this is a taboo topic on DAZ. They are locking and deleting threads as fast as people can make them. Yep, that is why DAZ is great, opinioins that are contrary get deleted.

There is a pinned thread in the members only forum (only PC club members) where many people are complaining about the PC+ changes. There are 400+ posted in that thread, many of them very negative. The DAZ admins did lock some other threads in members only forum because they were just duplicating the discussion in the pinned thread. The admins asked people to use that thread. I did not see any threads in other forums, but DAZ may be limiting discussion of this to the members only forum.  It is possible some posts or threads were deleted, but I did not notice it.

I'm not thrilled about PC+. I never switched over to PC+ during the beta because I didn't see where it was better for me and I have not switched over to the new one yet. My membership in the old PC is good till October, at which point I will have to switch over.

DAZ like Renderosity is a company in buisness to make money. They have to keep evaluating their buisness model and making changes they think are necessary. As customers we get to re-evaluate where we spend our money. If you don't like PC+, then don't join or don't renew when your membership expires.  Complaining about PC+ here is not going to do anything. Complaining on the thread in the members only forum will at least get your complaints seen by the DAZ staff, although I doubt it will have much effect. DAZ did closely monitor the complaint thread during the PC+ beta period and they did make changes to what is now PC+ as a result. I doubt they will make any more changes for a year or more.

Quote - I noticed some beach scenes products were " unavailable" and you can't add them to the cart or wishlist ???

 

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/beach-scenes-creator/81031/

 

I have that product.  Did not release that EmmaAndJordi had stopped selling here.

They are still actively releasing new products in the DAZ store.

Emma's website is http://www.emmaalvarez.com/

She has a blog there that she has been updating recently with the new products being released in the DAZ Store. She still has a link to the Renderosity store, which is now empty. I didn't see any information about the Renderosity store there.

Edit: This must have happened recently. I had one of EmmaAndJordi's products on my wishlist. I remember seeing it there recently. It is no longer on my wishlist.

This depends on what the content is. Most poser content will work to some degree in DAZ Studio. The materials frequently need to be adjusted.

Some things do not work at all. Poser Dynamic clothes will not work in DAZ Studio. Poser Dawn clothes does not work on the DAZ Studio version of Dawn. 

It all depends on what the product is.