Im disappointed that the render times in the beta version are still so abysmally slow. Has anyone heard if this issue will be addressed soon? Also, is anyone satisfied with the screen layout? Im trying to move things around but the menus are so clumsy looking.

Abysmally slow? Have you used Bryce or any other program like that? Now "that" is abysmally slow. In comparison to Firefly and a few other quickie render apps Studio holds up pretty well. Then again I'm used to waiting 18 hours to 10 days for a render to finish so maybe I'm more forgiving. I agree that the screen layout isn't precisely what I like. Everything is somewhat on the large side. I'd rather that Daz followed a little more closely the lightwave style (if that's their intention) and made the menu and slider controls somewhat smaller. More workspace, less panel size. The layout may be user customisable later depending on whether they clean up the graphic overlays which means we could see some very attractive alternatives developed but that's an interesting question considering the way it's currently designed. I'm far more inclined towards large work area and small tool bars myself so the Daz interface actually strikes me as rather ugly and clumsy, especially as it takes so much screen space to display. Dragging all the tabs into one area doesn't significantly increase the work area which I find rather sad. This may improve as Daz get more feedback from users during the beta stage.

I agree with what your saying, but slow is slow. I hope this is not what we will have to live with.

Depends what you mean by slow. I don't find waiting a couple minutes to be slow. As a preview renderer the area box is fine for checking things out, the open gl preview while not showing lights accurately does show textures fairly well and actually rendering something I've yet to have to wait longer than 10 minutes, I don't honestly find that unreasonable or particularly difficult to live with. Personally I'm utterly sick of the Poser 4 renderer, have been for years which is why I went off looking for something else - starting with Bryce and finally ending with Cinema, all the apps I tried had render times that dragged into multiple hours or days. In that respect the 3Delight engine used by Studio still comes over as extremely fast and efficient but, like Poser, lacking in some areas. Those areas obviously add considerable amounts of time to renders. If you're used to using Poser 4 and having to render constantly to preview something then I can understand why you don't like the slightly longer times of Studio, but you don't "have" to render constantly in Studio to check out what you've done. If you're checking lights in a scene, then just select a small part of the image to render to see how the lights are playing on that area of the surfaces, it's as good a clue as rendering the whole thing. Studio has had a spot renderer for some time and that, like the same option in Bryce is more than adequate for checking areas of the scene for lighting/texture results. Not to mention that it's also a heck of a lot faster than waiting for the whole image to render.

Change the renderer from circular (the default) to horizontal and it will help some. I really don't understand why they put that stupid circular renderer as default, apart from random, it's the slowest of them all.

personally, while DS is slow compared to Poser, as someone who has waited 4 days for a Bryce render to complete I find DS's render times to be more than adequate. I do agree that the screen layout is clumsy at best. I don't find I have enough workspace either.

I've found that the Mac version is a big improvement over the Alpha which completely unusable on my machine. It's still incredibly slow though, not just the renderer, even changing parameters. I hope there's still a lot of optimisation to be done! - Baz

The first thing I did was switch from circular to horizontal. Not for reasons of speed. I tried one circular and then killed it. Horrible. I have a feeling that the rendering side of things may not be programmed by the DAZ techs. It would make sense for them to let 3dlight do it and just pick up the entire rendering engine all ready to go. mac

That does seem to be what they're doing Mac, the last delay IIRC was as a result of waiting for a fix in the render engine regarding bump/displacement. So it would appear that the 3delight engine is being seperately programmed and daz are integrating that into Studio rather than writing it themselves. Makes a lot of sense to bring in a ready to roll render engine than spend the resources building one. It's worked fine for other applications so why not? Would be nice if they did something about the size of the GUI though. I know you can drag things around but those huge blue buttons and sliders are ... annoying. Something smaller and neater would have made the whole interface and interaction more pleasurable. Ahh, that's what feedback is for neh? :)

Yep, I'm not crazy about the big, klunky panes myself. I'm putting that in as a feature request - small and highly customizable. mac PS How you doin' anyway?

I'll second that feature request. I'd much rather see smaller panes and smaller buttons, drop down menus and sliders... and smaller icons. Or at the very least the option to customise the interface. Oh doing fine thanks, heavily involved in that horrid thing called "real life" unfortunately. Thankfully I get this weekend off so I can play around with some things I've been ignoring.

I'm using the Mac version and I have a couple of questions: 1. How do you add a background? I haven't been able to find any mention in the docs. Is it there? 2. When I import a character from P5 it ends up looking like the character has been through a blender. Anybody find this problem or (which is quite possible) am I doing something wrong? Tony

As far as I can tell you can't add a "background" to Studio via an image, you'll need to use either one of the free scene props that are available from either Nerd or RDNA or someone (I think I still have one I made on my drive somewhere) or the cyclorama from Daz. Can't answer your second question as I don't have P5, sorry. At a guess, if you mean through a blender to say the textures are all messed up, that's not surprising. Poser 5 texture settings are vastly different to Studio and Poser4 which Studio currently imports from.

Not just the textures. The whole model is trashed.

Oh icky... Any chance of knowing what model was trashed on import? Might help someone else here to figure out what went wrong and whether it's a studio issue or not. :)

It was the P5 nude female.

Thanks Tony, hopefully someone else who has P5 will try it as well, see if it's something weird with Studio or just general weirdness. Have you tried any other models? Do they import ok, or is it just Judy?

I'll try some of the others later. I'm trying to get a bunch's things done before going in to the hospital for tests in the morning. Believe me, I'd rather be playing with a program! Tony

LOL. I know what you mean, I'd much rather be playing around on my computer than some of the things I have to do lately. Ah well. Hope the tests go ok for you, I got very happy results from my last set so if it's ok I'll wish the same for you.

Can't help with the Poser 5 model problem... Even the basic P5 stuff imported into DAZ Studio will lock up my system, although I can accept that I'm at the low ened of the memory scale. I tried some P3 stuff I still have, and models loaded, but texture-maps still had problems. Used to be that a half-gig of RAM was an incredible amount... I'm afraid it isn't going to replace my working P5 install if I have to do a major OS/RAM upgrade to do the same stuff.