Things Not Seen Until Rendered

IceScribe

I noted in a post by someone who was discussing "bald" patches of hair on Genesis 8. I tried a hair on G8, and sure enough in the viewport, it looks bald. Drove myself batty trying to move the darn hair, unparent, etc. Wouldn't budge or scale. I had something else in the scene so I did an Iray render to see how that would look, and blimey! The hair rendered out like the promo! No bald spot. Whew! Well, next I decided to play with the Beer Drinking Props. Drove my self batty again for 2 days, off and on, trying to get the "beer" to appear in the glass. Uninstall, reinstall, close Daz, reboot. Select in Surfaces, looked at posing, parameters, etc. I could not get that glass to color much less show the preset material, and the "beer" never worked. I remembered how the "bald" hair post was, so I went ahead and rendered the bland smooth cone, and presto! The "beer and it's foam" in the glass appeared. Today, I thought, I'll try the Gobo lights set I bought about a month ago. Could not get them to work, long tedious tuts on Youtube about emissive lights, primitive lights, God rays, caustics, etc, etc, Gobo lights. Today, I tried several Gobos, not realizing each one stacked over the first. I deleted the extras, to just one. Then I gave up and just rendered the scene to see where to place an opportune tree branch to cast a shadow pattern. Presto! Gobo light patterns in my scene.

Not one of these products ever said "BTW, dear customer, you will not see this at all, or accurately until you render it". I have watched most of the 30 min or less videos on youtube (any longer and I fall asleep). No where, not once has this point been brought up. It is very nerve racking for newbies, and intermediates to buy an interesting effect or prop but not understand it is not moveable, modifiable, or visible until an Iray render is run. I don't use the auxialliary tab, it doesn't seem to be any faster than just doing a partial render. But, maybe it would have shown the darn things. I'll have to check that out. 

There is also the "solid grey cube" that appears from imported 3rd party products. No, it's not in my library, I don't know how to install the stuff poser-wise, so I just drag and drop from the uncompressed folder with the geometry, runtime and materials on to my viewport, and if the vendor scatters the mats into different folders, I copy and paste them into one, and that works for me to use the menu locator from the Surface tab. After all, I do that once and save the character. That way I don't get the dialog "can't find the bmp" etc.

From inquiries made by other confused and frustrated users, I see there is what appears to be the standard IT advice (remember those techs from the good old 80s? every thing was fixed by 'reboot'?)Similarly,  It's not the directory or content manager, it's not the lighting, it's the fact the thing MUST be rendered to see the "object" or effect as "hair" or "beer" or light patterns. I started out with DAZ studio when the V2 version was just being replaced by V3. I had the DAZ1 and 2 back then. I am self-taught through the kindness of tutorial producers and trial and error, and the posts of other confused users. Problem for us less versed in the jargon is, as usual, we don't know the buzz words, until we know them. So all we can do is say, the thing I bought and installed doesn't work like the other stuff I use. But, for now, my beer glass is half-full.

kyoto kid

...OpenGL is what the viewport uses for default display mode. It is fairly limited in how it handles textures and lighting (it also does not support physically based lighting which Iray uses). If you have a decent GPU card (at least 4 GB) you can switch to Iray View mode which will show more accurately how your scene will appear when rendered

IceScribe

Eureka! Thank you, Kyoto Kid, for this elegantly simple explanation, and effective suggestion. You guessed I was viewing through Texture Shaded view. 

Using the Beer props, I see the Iray bits render the glass with the liquid height/tilt  morphs in color working. 

kyoto kid

...glad I could help.