hi guys
i would like to know what the perfect render settings for Daz Studio 3 are ... to product a decent portrait or image ....
also i'm using the uber lighting that comes with DS3 .... so light settings would also be great to know, 've tried some and its like burning V4 to a crisp lol ....

i'm going to look up the uber environment wiki and read that also ....

thanks for any advice you may have

xx 

I usually use around seven of the distant lights and have them placed around the subject at various shades of grey to light blue, then have at least one placed slightly above and set it to 120-150% density, this will be the sunlight, also have that light source set with ray-traced shadows. The results are quite effective for outdoors.

Here are some notes on render settings I've collected:

Your number 1 quality nob is: Shading Rate. Right now you're at the DS3 default of 1.00 which is a fairly soft / average shading rate. It sacrifices quality for speed. The minimum (best) shading rate you'd want to consider is 0.20. Personally 99% of my renders are done at 0.40 or 0.30. Rarely can I tell the difference between the two. Just remember that the lower the shading rate the higher the quality. Settings under 0.20 are almost impossible to detect and can dramatically increase the render time when compared to 0.20.

Your next quality nob are the Pixel Samples. Up the X/Y Pixel Samples to 6 or even to 8 (no need to go any higher unless you're using Depth of Field in which case, temporarily go to 12 or 16) depending on if you're doing a very large depth of field or a very shallow one respectively).

Lastly, is shadow samples. The larger and sharper your render the more you want to consider upping the shadow samples. I wouldn't go beyond 32 though unless you're wanting layered shadow effects with different colors or something unusual like that.

That's all that you really need to consider for tweaking "quality"...

Depending on your system you can up the bucket size to 32 or even 64. This can help offset (a tiny bit) the render time hit that applying all of the above will generate, however, it comes at a cost. The larger the bucket size the slower DS3 is to cancel a render as it must "finish" processing each active bucket in the queue when cancel is pressed before returning control to the system and upping the bucket size makes the bucket larger, thus it has more data to contend with, etc. The bucket size does not affect render quality.

For more reading on the Renderman controls see the Renderman wiki -> http://www.k-3d.org/wiki/RenderMan_Controls

Edited to add: As long as you're using software rendering, the Video Card setup has NO impact on quality what-so-ever. It can (and does) have impact on the preview window and how well that performs while setting the scene up though.

Raytrace Depth: I didn't touch on that dial, but for most applications a Raytrace Depth of 2 is sufficient. What this setting means is basically the number of "bounces" to "bounce" each light source. It's really most useful when dealing with reflections. If you're doing a single reflecting surface, a raytrace depth of 2 is enough. Ie, light bounces off the target and bounces off the reflective surface = 2. If you're doing multiple reflective surfaces and they need to reflect what the other is seeing, you're going to want to double the depth. Ie, 4. For reflections of reflections of reflections, you'll want 6. Basically it boils down to the number of reflections you want shown * 2. Raytrace Depth is a HUGE and I mean HUGE render time hit so be careful upping it unnecessarily.

3delight renders the image divided into multiple areas (buckets) according to the specified bucket size. One important thing to keep in mind here is that 3delight only needs to keep in memory what is required to render the current bucket.

A lower bucket sizes can make a world of a difference if you are attempting to render more complex scenes, especially in a 32bit environment.

• IIRC, ray-trace depth also needs to be taken into account when using transparency

If you wanted light to shine through 3 layers of transparency AND produce a shadow, you'd need a raytrace level of 4. That's a pretty rare scenario, but you're right it's one people should be aware of.

Gain adjusts Contrast, Gamma adjusts Brightness.

I have seen some of your artwork and there is not much I can probably tell you that you don't already know. The only point I can possibly give you is to play with the textures a little when rendering. Sometimes they are too glossy and need to be adjusted so they look more natural. I hope this may be of some help.

Here is a link you may want to look at:
www.omnifreaker.com/index.php

 Thing is i am a Poser user, but i just felt i needed to do something with DS ..... 
thankyou for the tips i'll put them to good use!!!