Nice one Richard, I did not think of that idea! +10 ^_^

I tell you something, I am not sure that people looking over your/my shoulder DO think! ^_^

Without joking, when you see the number of more or less "naughty" power-point slideshows that are passed over the enterprise networks ...

Glad that all works well now! ^_^

Very strange indeed Antoinette, could you give some information about your render settings and image size?
Did you try a "render to view port" or "render to disk" to see if it still renders black?

Peter

Very easy, you just have to create a groundplane!

By default there is no groundplane, any figure is loaded at y-position 0, so if you want shadows go to "Create->primitives->plane" you may scale it as you need and hit render.

Another thing, make sure you are using the 3Delight renderengine and not the OpenGL render!

If you want to composite your render with a photo, have a look over at DAZ at PoseWork's pwCatch, correctely applied to the plane, D|S will only render your character plus the shadow but not the rest of the plane, very handy!

Pose over a white background to see all details but render over a black background and save it as .png, so you get the alpha-information integrated.

Hey Schlabber, welcome back and good to see you!

Awesome Gill, thanks a lot! ^_^

Yep, when I see those big screens!

But do as I did Gill, I use two 15" screens, I don't have the space to use bigger and for Vue 6 Esprit/Pro it does not make any difference.

Can you use two screens with 6Inf?

Most of the images in the D|S section are rendered with 3Delight, as Richard said, it is a question of plug-ins, shaders and postwork.
If you just load an item into the scene and render it like that, with the default lightning, you are sure to see a great difference with the promo images. Have a look at the DAZ-Forum or here to find some tutos on setting up the scene and lightning and using some free shaders.
Leaving the path of default settings will always get you better results!

Glad that it works now, happy rendering! ^_^

Yep, thats where I am jealous!
My own working space!

Now I am in a living room corner, trying to work with my girls and my mother in law watching "Desperate housewives"!

And I am a desperate artist, maybe I could install my gear in the cellar room on the washing machine?

Ok, but I would like the photo with the racoons! I don't care much about rats but racoons are funny! ^_-

No, it's real artifical zebra skin! ^_-

Mine is a bit crowed, there are all kind of critters in my little part of the living room! ^_-

When you render in D|S, what is your back ground colour?

As a little guideline, pose over a white or medium grey background just to see what you are doing and render over a black background. Use "File -> Save last render" to save yourr render as .png (this way the alpha-information is included, if you have it, DO NOT use the RenderEditor to save your render since it does not save alpha informations even in .png).

This way you will find less to no artefacts in the trans-mapped aeras.