Quote - The young morph seems to inject the young head morph instead of the body.

Just edit the young pz2 to read

{
    version
    {
        number 4.01
    }

    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Morphs++:InjDeltas.PHMHeadYoung.pz2"
    readScript ":Runtime:libraries:!DAZ:Victoria 4:Deltas:Morphs++:InjDeltas.FBMYoung.pz2"
}

Thanks! That was exactly what I was looking for! Wow, what a massive programming blunder; I'm surprised DAZ hasn't fixed that yet!

Oh, it's Poser 7 by the way.

Wow. Looks fantastic! And I recognize that hair (Wildcat Hair, I think); it's given me fits in the past rendering it in Carrara. 3 minutes for results like that is unreal!

Honestly, I don't really care who takes over Carrara, as long as they get it away from DAZ. The one reason why I loved Carrara was because of Transposer. I could do all of my work in Poser, my posing program of choice, and then render it and build a scene in Carrara. That was the perfect workflow for me. But it seems DAZ has made a concerted effort to make Carrara as Poser un-friendly as possible, so it's highly unlikely I'll shell out any money for Carrara 9 whenever it comes out.

Quote - ...The only thing I can think of to speed-up your render time is to not use skylight, but simulate it with several distant lights. Depending on how you place your distant lights, you could get anything from a dull to a very good render, so you will have to experiment...

Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been doing, for the most part. I don't do much still work; most of my work has been webcomics and animation, so I try to get the best quality in as little time as possible. Using globals with shadow buffers and the right settings gets results that wouldn't be mistaken for Sky Lighting, but at least provides realistic ambient effects with some "pseudo" occlusion. Not a bad option.

I don't have an Nvidia card, but I've already made a note to myself that when I get my next system, it needs to have Nvidia graphics, for a number of reasons. The fact that Octane is Nvidia-friendly just puts it over the top. I'll definitely be looking into that, thanks!

(also, your gallery rocks! The "Castle Mage" image... I'm guessing you used raytraced DoF? That's a real killer when it comes to render times! It gets good results though. Usually I'm too lazy for that and I just cheat and do DoF in post)

Keeping everything in perspective though, I'd still say Carrara's quite a bit faster than Poser when it comes to rendering reflections and shadows. And it's easier to work with than Vue. I'm wondering what other renderers are out there that are quick and give decent results? Will probably try free Shade demo, or maybe the Luxus plugin. Overall, I'm mostly happy with Carrara, and it'll work fine for what I need from it, but still worth checking out some other options as well.

In general, I'm very pleased with the speed and quality I get with Sky Lighting and with Indirect Lighting. It whizzes through most parts of a given render... but it always hangs up when it gets to hair, and transparent stuff like glass with refraction. It's really just that one thing that makes it not a feasible option more often than not.

Here's a look at the render settings. For a small render (640x480) it takes about 13 minutes to render a single figure with hair, no background. Turning down the lighting quality to "Fast" and the accuracy to 16 pixels gives me a faster render speed, about 8 minutes. That's tolerable, at least, but worrisome for larger or more intricate renders.

Mostly, I was hoping there was someplace I could turn off certain render settings for certain objects. I'm sure I've seen this in other software, but I may be mistaken. Doesn't look like Carrara has any such option.

Google Sky. It's a decent option for a 2D background, with a little bit of postwork maybe.

@Joe: I was basically just looking for an accurate depiction of what space would look like in outer space, not a true "map," in the cartological sense. And yes, I'm aware that all that stuff moves over time, but I'm not that obsessive compulsive!

Quote - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Tycho_catalog_skymap_v2.0_%28threshold_magnitude_3.0,_high-res%29.jpg

http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/starfield/

http://jermi.dyndns.org/~jermi/Portfolio2007/

Cool, thanks! Those look excellent! I'll have to give them a try; may need to tweek them a bit, but that's pretty much what I was looking for.

Basically, the best I've been able to do is patch stuff together using programs like Google Sky or the Smithsonian's Digital Universe, but I just can't believe no one's bothered to put together an actual sphere map, given the available source material. That would make life so much easier!

Apologies for my provocative earlier post. While I do think (well, actually I KNOW) the things I mentioned are a serious concern for a great many people, I don't believe this is the place for discussing the underlying validity of those concerns. So anyone who wishes to take issue with what I said, please do so through the private messaging system and don't spam up this thread any further. Thank you.

This is all pretty awesome. My guess though is that if Dawn sees too much early success, DAZ will counter by suddenly doing an about-face and putting out a true Poser figure based on Genesis 2. Hopefully if that happens, no one takes the bait, because we've all seen now what DAZ's ultimate goal is.

Even if the first Dawn doesn't completely knock my socks off, I plan to support her and HiveWire as a customer, because every dollar given to them is a vote against DAZ platform despotism. And if HiveWire manages to survive that turbulent early period and get more $$$ and more merchants and modelers on board, their future releases should rival anything DAZ is capable of. The main thing is giving them a lot of early support, when they need it most!