OK, thanks for that info guys.

OK, thanks Richard. I later decided to just take a picture with camera & zoom lens of a featureless, clear blue sky and use that as my background for when I want that color. I have been using the .bmp format for rendering files. By transparent background, what do you mean exactly, just plain white or that white & grey checkered pattern? Anyway, plain white is what I got with one setting while using .tif .

Yes I know that. But how to get my original Hollywood Boulevard blue background back instead of the pitch black background in the actual render is what I need to know.

CyberDream posted at 11:14PM Wed, 09 March 2016 - #4260143

Are you sure you haven't set your display to "Smooth Shaded"?

How do you even do that though? By "display" you're not talking about the monitor are you?

I ran into a similar sounding problem as kittykat when DS 4.8 was rendering my character with a bleached out white face or maybe more like a silver face, but it was her face only. No other part of her body, and the eyes, eyelashes, lips & mouth were all completely normal/unaffected. It was only her face skin texture. AND it only happened if I applied a skin vascularity LIE, that ironically put no vascularity(blood vessels)on her face. Otherwise, her face skin texture is fine. Still don't know what's up with that. I contacted the Vascularity product creator, who said he didn't know why that was happening either. He said he would check into it further, so still waiting to hear back from him.

Too bad ZevO closed his shop here. It was a store product. Anyway, the Genesis 2 & 3 versions of the product are at the main DAZ site. But unfortunately not for Victoria series anymore as mine is. SimonWM has a similar product but only for V5 & 6. And the vascularity maps he has won't match that of the vascularity in my girl I got from Zev0. I still have most of the old renders so if I change products, she won't look the same.

But anyway, here's Zev0''s available vascularity products: Oh, wait, I just remembered. The last time I posted a link to the DAZ store, the Rendo admin deleted my message because apparently that's not allowed here. Anyway, just go to the DAZ store & type in Vascularity, and you'll find it.

I still can't figure out why applying a vascularity LIE preset would do that to her face, when her face is the one part of her body where no vascularity was ever present at all. It doesn't make sense. Also, the background behind her is not that color; I just don't know where that's coming from.

Hi Richard,

Nope, no error messages. Apparently the render engine assumes her face is supposed to be silver. Even though as I'm looking at it within DS it's her normal, flesh color & detailed facial skin.

I've done the render using the render window & also direct to file. I also tried it using IRay(default settings again), and got tired of waiting after several minutes so stopped the render. But even though it looked predictably grainy, it still showed the same silver face effect. I don't know why. The rest of her body is perfectly normal. I see vascularity in the rest of her body with no adverse effect or discoloration of her skin.

Pretty cool pic; I like it!

"Database export." How is that done?

If I choose to upgrade to 4.9(if rendering really is significantly faster enough to make it worth my while)will I have to uninstall 4.8 to do that or will it install over 4.8?

I just spent a whole lot of time recently installing 4.8 and reinstalling ALL my Victoria content & spending several days unzipping content to My Library. Will I have to do that all over again?

Thanks for that info Madbat. Do you use any of the Incandescent light shaders in your scenes? I would be more likely to use those to simulate typical indoor house lights as that's what ceiling & table lamps mostly use for residential indoor use. Although I might want to occasionally use monitor luminance when a TV is in the scene. But most of the time, I'd be wanting to use incandescent for nearby table & ceiling lamps.

So you can resume a render after it is done? Trying hard to wrap my head around that.

Thanks for that info everyone. Much appreciated.

Thanks for that info everyone.

fictionalbookshelf posted at 2:45PM Sat, 06 February 2016 - #4253523

"It's not actual lights but shaders that adds emitting light settings to your material zone you want to apply it to."

Explain that a little more please. Does that mean that they are lighting efx that I apply to lights I already have in the scene? For instance I select the light(s) and then double-click one of the Real Lights to load that particular lighting effect like incandescent or fluorescent to that pre-existing light?

Or do I select a figure/character like Victoria and then load that particular shader to simulate that kind of light on her skin?

OK, thanks. And as for my 2nd question above about using it?