Bioinicskillzart works

The coloring technique seems to work really well, I really like how it looks on her left shoulder/arm.

Sorry to hear about your hard times.  Hope it does not last.

bionicskillz wrote: I’m learning Daz3d. Got a long way to go but here’s a recent wip. 
www.deviantart.com/bionicskillzart/art/3...urns-truck-825647348

That truck kinda needs textures - lighting seems to be the scene standard. How is your hardware for this? Specifically Graphics Card?

bionicskillz wrote: I did put textures on the truck after that screenshot. My set up is a
2017 Imac
4.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Radeon Pro 580 8 GB

I'm watching tutorials on lighting but if you have some tips let me know. Thanks!

Are you using IRay as the rendering engine? IRay works *a lot* faster with an nVidia card. You may need to accept a lower resolution or very long rendering times with a Radeon.

You've got a lot of noise in that image. I think you need more iterations to clean that up, or use a denoiser.

The pose looks good.

You can do a lot with the basic sun-sky lighting.  thinkdrawart.com/daz-studio-iray-sunlight-tutorial  has some tips on using a sun node, but even just playing with the lat/long and time of day settings can improve your results.

I often use HDRI lightingm like  www.daz3d.com/pro-studio-hdr-lighting-system-3  or  www.daz3d.com/skies-of-iradiance-sunny-sky-hdris-for-iray .

As Gincognifo already said, the preformance with a Radeon won't be great. In fact Nvidia Iray only supports cards with CUDA cores - which mean only Nvidias own graphics cards. Your renders are 100% done by the CPU this way meaning that it isn't useable at all during rendering,

This also explains the noise you have on the image. The more iterations run, the less there is, but with only CPU rendering this takes forever...

When it comes to lighting I found it helpful to switch the Vieport from Texture Shaded to Iray so it already renders the image as you edit it. Specifically with light sources or emitting surfaces this helps finding the right luminance. But also with questions like how to set the sun.
That eats a lot of performance, so I do not recommend it for you.

I think the best you can do right now is look for alternative render engines for DAZ.

Is the "3D" just related to posing the figure to render as a 2D image rather than any extra views or able to change view angle like a 360 degree capture?

slim36 wrote: Is the "3D" just related to posing the figure to render as a 2D image rather than any extra views or able to change view angle like a 360 degree capture?

Not sure I understand the question, but the outcome of the render is usually either an image or a movie. However you do create 3d scenes, so you can pose everything in all three dimensions and look at that from different angles. Besides your free view you can create cameras that show a certain angle that you like and that you can quickly change to from your view. If you are creating a movie that camera can move on the timeline just like the figures.

The closest thing to a 360° image would be changing the viewport to IRAY and see it being rendered on the fly but that is a LOT slower. Also opening someone else's DAZ file usually gives a lot of "Resource not found" errors since the creator of that scene owns and uses different products than yourself.

njae wrote: When it comes to lighting I found it helpful to switch the Vieport from Texture Shaded to Iray so it already renders the image as you edit it. Specifically with light sources or emitting surfaces this helps finding the right luminance. But also with questions like how to set the sun.
That eats a lot of performance, so I do not recommend it for you.
.

100% agree. I switch between my laptop and desktop when working with Daz. On the desktop, I'm able to run the viewport in IRay mode and it's incredibly useful. On the laptop, which is using the CPU, IRay preview is unusable.

Lighting is my bugbear and the weakest part of my renders which is why I often use the HDRI lighting. The results are usually "good enough" but not as good as they could be.

Gincognifo wrote:

njae wrote: When it comes to lighting I found it helpful to switch the Vieport from Texture Shaded to Iray so it already renders the image as you edit it. Specifically with light sources or emitting surfaces this helps finding the right luminance. But also with questions like how to set the sun.
That eats a lot of performance, so I do not recommend it for you.
.

100% agree. I switch between my laptop and desktop when working with Daz. On the desktop, I'm able to run the viewport in IRay mode and it's incredibly useful. On the laptop, which is using the CPU, IRay preview is unusable.

Lighting is my bugbear and the weakest part of my renders which is why I often use the HDRI lighting. The results are usually "good enough" but not as good as they could be.

Used to do the same but the laptop is so bad when it comes to DAZ that I stopped using it. And after one of the updates it is no longer possible.

And lighting is a weakness of mine as well, I usually fully used the HDRIs to get that done. That kinda fails once you want a scene at night where the light can NOT come from the sky. Getting better at this actually created my newest project: A redo of an old scene now with much better lighting.

njae wrote: Used to do the same but the laptop is so bad when it comes to DAZ that I stopped using it. And after one of the updates it is no longer possible.

And lighting is a weakness of mine as well, I usually fully used the HDRIs to get that done. That kinda fails once you want a scene at night where the light can NOT come from the sky. Getting better at this actually created my newest project: A redo of an old scene now with much better lighting.

Oh god, night scenes are the worst.  Space scenes have a similar issue.