Not familiar with using XGrid but couldn't you just run the LuxRender on each machine and enable the network rendering as outlined in the user manual?

Genesis supports several UV maps that can be swapped between. By default it uses V4 and includes V4 and K4. M5 and V5 each add their own maps (not sure about S5, I don't have her yet).

Earlier this year, DAZ released the gen 3 morphs for Genesis as well and I think that added the corresponding gen 3 UVs so that could be how you've been able to use an H3 texture.

Yeah, the thing to realize with UE and a lot of the other Uber products is that a lot of their quality settings are driven by their parameters, separately from your render settings.

You can dial in more specific settings in the UE parameters as well but I find the presets more convenient unless you're doing something specific. Worth reading up on the docs though to get a better understanding of what the various settngs do.

Hi, sorry earlier I'd replied on my laptop so wasn't able to give specifics from DAZ.

In DAZ 4 or 4.5, select the lights and cameras tab, and select the UberEnvironment from the scene panel. Under presets there should be some presets for UE and you'll see ones like "Set Quality 0XLo", "Set Quality 1Lo", etc. I've usually used the 4XHi preset but it will punish your rendering times so I'd stick with the low quality settings while getting everything right, then crank it up for your final render.

If you're not using the Smart Content or are in DAZ 3 (which I've not used), they should be in your content library under Light Presets -> omnifreaker -> UberEnvironment2.

Are you using UberEnvironment anywhere? Not familiar with prop but to me it looks like when UE is set to low quality settings. There should be some quality presets for UE that you cna use to improve the render quality.

FYI, for me the biggy that pushed me to go with DS4A over the free version was that DS4A is 64-bit. I have 8gb of ram right now and am contemplating going to 16gb since the upgrade I need is pretty cheap right now. If I was just using the free version I'd get no benefit from all that extra memory.

Without seeing any images it's really hard to say if the issue is with your render settings or with your lighting setup.

I can strongly recommend the render preset scripts found on this thread, http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=177995 as a great starting point. I've been really happy with the final quality setting from these scripts plus it makes it super easy to quickly flip from draft or medium while you're fine tuning things before flipping to final when you have things dialed in.

In terms of the "black fungus" when you're using the Uber Environment lights there are quality presets. On the lower settings, you get tons of splotches but they render much more quickly, for final renders use the highest quality preset to eliminate them (at the expense of render times).

If you're layering in Photoshop anyway then try this:

Start with a black background, then set each layer above to screen. Screen only lightens whereas overlay lightens and darkens. So whatever's black in 1 layer won't add any light. Then you can adjust the intensity of each light independantly with the opacity sliders.

For even more fun, you can work with white light only and then adjust the colour of the light in Photoshop (I like using the Photo filter adjustment layer to warm up or cool down lights but I have a photo background so I find this way very intuitive).

I've had good results with just rendering each light independantly at 100% intensity and white and then colouring them in Photoshop this way and using the opacity as an intensity slider. I converted each layer to a smart object so that I could apply whatever adjustment layers I wanted to each light without having to worry about masking the adjustment layers (since the screen blending mode is applied to the smart object).

The big advantage of this technique is that you get to adjust each light after the render without having to re-render and your renders should go much more quickly with only 1 light per render.

Not sure about the morphs situation, I know that most (all?) of the PW shaders were updated to support DS4, should just have to make sure you have the latest version.

I'm pretty sure Light Dome Pro hasn't been updated for DS4.

In terms of the Mac Pro, all of the Mac Pros used Intel processors that will support 64-bit so that's not an issue. However, unless you have more than 4gb of ram you won't see any benefit from having a 64-bit application.

To me, the eyes look a little "dead", it looks like they might need some more specularity, glossiness or reflection. To my eye, it looks like maybe the reflection in the eye is painted on rather than actually reflecting the lights.

Bit of a long-winded way of saying, "I agree that the eyes need to be brighter."

Quote - Does the DAZ 3D Bridge work with Photoshop Elements?

 

Thanks kindly...

I don't think that Photoshop Elements has 3d functionality. I know that's one of the big features of Photoshop Extended over Photoshop Standard so I can't see them including it in Elements.

Awesome, downloading now. Thanks for the quick response on a holiday weekend in the US (we eat our Turkeys in October in Canada).

I'd accidentally started the first couple downloads using a download manager and I've seen it play havoc with sites that require signing in so normally I don't use it for that purpose so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what caused the issue.

Everything else downloaded fine for my order and this just finished as well, great job.

I'm having the same problem with breaking the wall 1 part 2. Part 1 downloaded fine and so far the other files in the same order are going fine as well.