Digital Art Zone

I just started using Daz a few days ago, so please bare with me.  The program is fantastic except for the fact the figures, clothing, hair, skin, you name it, look really BAD within the program.  However, if I choose to render the image and save it, the resulting picture looks great. 

I’ve seen videos of people using Daz and not having this issue?  Is there anything I can do to change this?  I have a laptop with 3gb ram.

Also, is it supposed to take nearly 30 minutes for a picture to render?  The pixels were set to 250x323.  Screenshot and finished picture are attached.  Thanks in advance.

What you see in the viewport is displayed using OpenGL, and it does not display lighting the way the render engine (3Delight) does.  If this was not the case, every time you moved a model or added clothing, it would take a long time to render.

What slows rendering down a lot, is transparency maps, and lighting.  Unlike the OpenGL viewport, the render engine uses raytracing, and has to calculate how the light affects each surface.  If you have a multi-core processor, DS4 can use all of it’s cores.  Your graphics card or chip is only used for the viewport.

What you see before rendering is using OpenGL (Google will explain OpenGL better than I) and doesn’t take all the light and surfaces in to consideration until you engage the render engine which brings out the various effects.

Take reflections for example you won’t see any reflections in the viewport only seeing the reflection when rendered. This is same for surfaces and lights etc.

Many surface and lighting effects are only available in the software renderer, so they won’t appear correctly in the viewport.

Fancy lighting can sometimes take a long time, especially with transmapped items like hair.  Can you go to the Render settings and post a screenshot of the advanced settings?

Okay.  I’m just glad it’s normal and not a bug or something.  Thanks for the help.