Problem with 3Delight Rendering

Vyrdolak

I'm new to DAZ, I just started using it in July.

I've been working on a scene for a while, fine-tuning the poses a lot (hands and fingers, mostly). Very suddenly, the scene has started rendering with a very hard, shiny surface, as though the figures were made of very shiny plastic. Up to now, they've looked very natural. This effect is stuck in the scene--I checked a couple of other scenes and they render okay. But before this, I was having trouble spot-rendering at all; I'd select the area to spot render and nothing would happen. I also was occasionally having spot renders come out with parts of figures turning brilliant green instead of skin toned. That's happened in other scenes, too. I wasn't adjusting any of the surfaces at all, just the poses and lights.

Am I doing something wrong or is this a problem with 3Delight?

V3Digitimes

This sounds really strange. On rare occasions, 3Delight can have problem with some specific shaders, but in general, when you stop DS, wait a while, and restart it, your scene is re-becoming normal.
I cannot solve the problem the way it is described, but I can give you clues to determine the exact origin of it. Finding the cause is finding the way to solve that.
- First make a copy of your scene somewhere, because you are going to make some tests on your scene.
- Open your scene, switch off all the lights (you can either delete them, or just close the "eye" corresponding to each of them in the scene tab).
Add just one distant light 50% intensity. Now make a render, making sure that in the render settings, the gain is set at 1. Do you still see the issue? If not, it came from the light, if yes, it can come from your figures, or something in your configuration.
- If the problem disappears when all the lights are off, meaning it comes from the light, re-switch on all the lights, one by one, until you find the "guilty" light.
- If the problem is still here, remove or hide your other figures in your scene, and load a basic Genesis or Genesis 2 figure with textures (V5, M5, M6, .... ). Render and see it the problem is still here. If the problem is not here, now you will have excluded both light and figure configuration. But prior going further in that, just make the simple things mentionned above to determine if it is a scene configuration issue, or if it comes from elsewhere.
Good luck, let us know!

Vyrdolak

Thanks for your response!

I did try removing lights and changing other aspects of the scene, which only consisted of figures, no background. Both figures were Gen2 females with some morphs and the whole issue appeared to be the skin textures, on both figures.

I think the scene must have gotten corrupted somehow. I tried opening and rendering it in another installation of DAZ on another computer and it did the same thing (shiny skin). All other scenes in my library rendered normally. I finally went back to the previous day's backup (I back up every day), redid the edits I'd made from scratch (I was able to save and load a complex pose from the affected file) and tried rendering the redone-from-backup scene. It was fine, and has been ever since. I guess I'm just left with a mystery.

It might have been the Wacom tablet and regular mouse crossing wires somehow. I was getting error messages about the Wacom driver and I just reinstalled it because the tablet mouse wasn't working right. With luck, I won't see this again!

Vyrdolak