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Sorry for spreading disinformation:( You can actually use the AoA shaders along with aweSurface if you use the DS standard lights or AoA lights to illuminate them. In this test the sphere is using aweSurface. It's illuminated by the default ruins HDRI. The AoA grass plane is illuminated by an AoA distant light and AoA ambient light. The AoA lights are flagged to illuminate only the grass. So this opens up a bunch of possibilities. I could for example use the HDRI only as a backdrop and use only standard lights. I found out this when thinking how to set up the 3DL scene of the Medieval Lands now that I got a 3DL ground plane (which is a shadow mixer network). Tks again @AndreyPestryakov! Yeah, have to experiment...
Sidenote: This renders very fast:)
..thanks. Yeah, I love that shader (which is displacement based). Odd it doesn't' work in anything but the default or AoA lights. I've had it work in UE, but then render times bloat as well.
Just noticed this thread now. Here's my input in regards to AWE Surface and 3delight in general.
I've made AWE Surface and Mustakettu's render script (with her consent) available for free to be used in personal and commercial capacity. That means if someone wants to bundle it with their freebie or commercial product, they can and are free to do so. They don't even have to ask or credit me or Mustakettu (although that would be nice). If you do need written proof or further info/help, then feel free to contact me.
AWE Surface will work with any point/spot/distant light that is available for DAZ Studio. That means both the built in lights, AoA's Advanced Lights and likely other lights as well. You can still use AWE Surface with any of omnifreaker's lights as well (UE2, UberArea etc) if you want to. This also means AWE Surface can be used with any other surface/volume shader in the scene.
What's inherently unique to AWE Surface is that the shader has its own GI implementation. It does not need ambient occlusion / indirect lighting lights like Advanced Ambient or UE2, though they can still be used. AWE Surface global illumination uses 'modern' 3delight shadeop that's optimized for 3delight modern path tracer. DAZ Studio can tap into this path tracer by enabling 'Use Progressive' when using the default 3delight renderer or via Mustakettu's script. Using Mustakettu's script will render diffuse/GI much faster due to the script enabling radiosity caching, which DAZ never expose/utilize to this day.
Essentially, to light a surface with AWE Surface, you can use any 'old 3delight' point/spot/distant/area lights. In addition, if you enable AWE Surface built in GI, any surface with ambient enabled will cast light to an AWE Surface material. As such, AWE Surface can actually 'receive' light from an environment sphere (like the one parented to UE2) as long as the environment sphere has ambient enabled (and the HDRI texture is inserted in the appropriate ambient color slot).
If you prefer not to have GI and rely solely on ambient occlusion, you can simply turn off the built-in GI. You can also turn off reflection to mimic what you get with dsDefaultMaterial, UberSurface or AoA's Subsurface.
If you do enable GI, AWE Surface will also react to the new path traced area lights automatically. Unlike point/spot/distant or even older area lights, these new area lights will be taken into account by the path tracer when doing multiple importance sampling. This means, if you're only using these lights, render times will decrease by half (50%) compared to render times with point/spot/distant or older area lights. In essence, if you use GI, you'll get support for proper, physically based area light for free. The same also applies to specular lights and reflection.
What kind of emitter can you use for this new path traced area light? Any non SubD mesh (plane/box/disc etc), though just like modern path tracers, the simpler the emitter mesh, the faster they'll render. They can also be instanced, with changes to the main node be instantly applied to all instances. Have as many lights as you need and there will be no render time penalty. AWE Surface global illumination and raytraced reflection uses proper, smart Russian roulette so you don't need to limit ray bounces either in the render settings or on the surface/material. You still can if you want to.
As far as I can tell, the only path traced area light shader available are my own AWE Area PT and Mustakettu's RadiumArea. If you don't want to use mine (available in the commercial product), I've included Mustakettu's Radium Area in my Google Drive folder. She has graciously allow the shader to be distributed for free. It doesn't have extra bells and whistles as mine, but it works just fine with AWE Surface (or her own shaders for that matter).
Now, I want to note some other features of AWE Surface.
Proper, physically based diffuse (Lambert/Oren Nayar) and specular BRDF (GGX/Ashihkmin Shirley/Cook Torrance). Defaults to Ashihkmin Shirley with a customized roughness curve so it's closer to GGX.
Support for PBR based textures and materials. You can use UE4/Unity/Substance style maps with AWE Surface ie metalness/metallicity, transmission, with proper dielectric and metallic/conductor Fresnel). Both roughness (UE4) and glossiness (Unity) are supported. You can import iray uber materials/textures/settings and with the help of a script, copy those into their respective AWE Surface equivalents.
In essence, with AWE Surface you can use PBR-style materials with 3delight in DAZ Studio. By that I mean, use proper, actual index of refraction value, masks, reflection/edge color as is.
So here it is. I respect any vendor's decision to not make 3delight materials and stick to iray. Personally, I have no problem with converting stuff on my own. But honestly, don't say you can't do 'proper' 3delight materials to match iray, because it is simply not true. It's entirely possible with a modern shader like AWE Surface. If you really want to make 'proper' materials for 3delight and not just mouthing it, go ask DAZ to actually make a proper PBR style material for 3delight. Don't say it can't be done. I know it can be and because I've done it. All the necessary tools and code needed are actually available either in DAZ Shader Builder and 3delight RSL sources.
Don't believe me? Here's what you'll see with 3delight NSI in Maya.
https://documentation.3delightcloud.com/display/3DFM9/3Delight+Material
https://www.3delight.com/documentation/display/3DFM9/3Delight+Principled
Have fun with 3delight in whatever application you're using.
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most of my shaders and light effects are incompatible with iray. the fantasy / sci-fi light beam effects just look black - cant render colour at all, and applying the emmisive shader wipes out the trans effects, making the main prop solid.
Put the trans map back into the cutout opacity slot