I wonder why you find the map creation unintuitive. It is not really hard. The fun thing is, you can be an artist. Create the brushes yourself or buy premade brushes, and sculpt on the model, then go to the uv tab, set the uv size and extract the details from te mesh with displacement or normal map.

This is a wip, but you can see, i sculpted pores and wrinkles and applied in this case only the normal map on the model and render to see how it looks. If i am done then i create the diffuse map. In bpr renders you want to have as flat as possbile diffuse maps. You can even use a solid color if the shaders are right and have good underlying maps( bump normal sss blood maps etc). That is why you can paint a diffuse map and it still looks realistic. Of course this takes much more time then using photos. Most of time i use as a base photos and paint on them, to get rid of the things i dont like or add stuff needed for the character.

The reason most professionals create a bump map first is easy. you can paint the diffuse map above the bump. For instance there are bumps and pimples, you can paint them on the same place as the bump map. I use mostly photos, you can of course start the diffuse first.

You have zbrush, Let us forget the maps first. Think about it, it is a sculpting app. You want pores, you want wrinkles( goodbye digital botox lol). Create the pores when sculpting. use the layer options to change the strength. Happy? bake them, export them as a normal map or displacement map ( you can eventually convert them to bump maps)

The question is, how do you produce the bump maps?

If you use the diffuse map and make a bump from it, then you get a wrong bump map. A bump map should always be made from scratch. Most professionals begin with the bump map and then create a diffuse map.

Now you mention 3dream, and immediately with my pet peeve. He usesa lot of reflection and also oversharpened skin. This can cause problems with bump/normal maps if you create them from the diffuse map.

From what i can remember you own zbrush. I create my bumps and normals in zbrush, directly onto the model. This way the pores are the right size. It does not matter which program you use for rendering. it is all the same. Here is an example of my gen 8 character( have not one on hand from a poser render on the moment) where i applied that tecnique:

thank you

I am sorry i indeed misread it, i have been up way too long sorry:) but still good info

I also found this:

http://buerobewegt.com/quicktip-rendering-even-faster-in-iray/

bhoins posted at 10:01PM Sat, 30 January 2016 - #4252238

Best way to learn lighting in Iray is to use photographic lighting tutorials.

Not only! i agree if you say that one only uses an HDRI, that is not good anymore, you can set the HDRI intensity very low and use photometric lights. The more lights the faster iray renders ( so i have heard). But dont underestimate the power of the Sun-Sky light, i think that one is most powerfull but for a lot of people also the hardest.

There are even more settings to reduce the grainy renders:

Adjust tone mapping settings: A higher ISO, a lower f/stop and a lower shutter speed number should improve it. You can also increase the cm^2 lumiance setting.

Hi drifterlee, I used Poser too for a very long time, but a physical renderer like iray or superfly cant be compared with a renderer like firefly. Ok you can change a lot in the settings to get less grainy images and render the images faster. Dont forget that if you change some settings it can also take longer!. The first thing you want to do is, make sure you have all the materials on the models Iray ready, if not, then it can take hours because Iray simply don't know what to do with the render materials. Second thing i recommend is this:

a lot of users don't know that they can scale the 2 Environment Spheres , it will affect the light, and also the HDRI maps usually I use Finite Sphere with ground on scaled down to only 9% for portraits or close ups and use Infinite Sphere only for landscape rendering like nature or cities . I also highly recommend to check off the Burn Highlights per component , set the Burn Highlights to 0.25 set Crush blacks to 0.20 setting off the Crush Blacks to 0 will create less contrast it is good for very close up portraits.

Third:

The best is to use the Sun Sky with the correct day time latitude , I use often the Exif data info from my photos to get exactly the light and second options are HDRI maps there is plenty free maps online to download when you load HDRI maps use the Finite Sphere and scale it 9 %down when use with models but not always and the last but not least are photo metric lights in Daz Studio to use with Iray , do not used distance light or spot point light from DS, for PBR only photometric lights works best.

In this preview render i made everything myself( textures, characters etc). This is just the iray view and not even really rendered, as you can see no grainy bits. and it was done in 5 mins. I can rotate and change it in real time and i have a lot of less resources than you! This is due to the fact every skin map is iray ready, this way it will render a lot faster. Also if you have displacement maps, it will take iray longer to render the files.

Most of the times the hair if it is a figure goes to People>genesis(male/female) ( be it 1 2 or 3) there you will find a sub category hair. Click on it, if you look at the lower panel on your left side you'll see the hair double click to load it. If you look at the hair category you'll find on the righ side another sub category called mats, this one could be divided in either iray or 3dlight( depending on the user) choose the one you need and you can then select your mats on the down left panel. Poses would be in the same category except now it is in the pose sub folder.

I included a screenshot for you to follow...

You may want to download this starter scene and observe what is possible with Iray and maybe work from there:

http://sickleyield.deviantart.com/art/Iray-Scene-For-Time-Benchmarks-519528033

I dont think there is a morph for that. If you have another modeling program you can try to do it yourself.

Impressive work on those tattoos.

You dont have to do anything other than load it via your directory in Studio.