Thank you Sonja. :) - Wonderful render, Dracorn, love the mood. 

And yes, except ThrowZ (DAZ culled the merchant who was my partner in this project), all of my effect packs got an update, but not all are life in store yet - only Z-Bundle I and II - Z-Bundle III and IV will follow. All effect packs now have bigger textures (usually twice the size they were before - means clearer rendering when scaled), all packs now have HQ morphing props - also the very "old" ones from Z-Bundle (FlameZ, SteamZ, DragonFire and ElementZ, means you can morph/deform an effect with 16 different shape morphs now) and additional DS Iray light emitting props with emitting adjustment presets to control how dark or light the effect is (means how much light the effect emits - depends also a bit how much additional light you have in your scene).

Fine to hear the updates are free for all that have bought the packs before. :) Even if you buy a not updated pack today, you will get the update soon, all packs were/are in Q/A. :)

  

So just to confirm, FlameZ III will be updated to Iray emissives? Right now, it's not updated in the store and neither are the PlateZ bundles. Will all these eventually be updated or do I need to purchase the new ones?

Thank you Sonja. :) - Wonderful render, Dracorn, love the mood. 

And yes, except ThrowZ (DAZ culled the merchant who was my partner in this project), all of my effect packs got an update, but not all are life in store yet - only Z-Bundle I and II - Z-Bundle III and IV will follow. All effect packs now have bigger textures (usually twice the size they were before - means clearer rendering when scaled), all packs now have HQ morphing props - also the very "old" ones from Z-Bundle (FlameZ, SteamZ, DragonFire and ElementZ, means you can morph/deform an effect with 16 different shape morphs now) and additional DS Iray light emitting props with emitting adjustment presets to control how dark or light the effect is (means how much light the effect emits - depends also a bit how much additional light you have in your scene).

Fine to hear the updates are free for all that have bought the packs before. :) Even if you buy a not updated pack today, you will get the update soon, all packs were/are in Q/A. :)

  

Thanks for the info about what is live and what isn't. Apparently the store pages for the prods in bundle III have been updated a little ahead of the fact. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out why I couldn't get the new versions of GrapchicZ, etc. And I have no hair to spare! :)

Oh yeah: MASSIVE thanks for updating the existing products and not making me buy new iray versions. I wish all PAs would do that with iray versions!

Yes, but with transmapped hair, at least you only need to do it once for each set of ears per hair.  And you can do a couple of short cuts if you use proportional editing.  I've been playing with hair in Blender a fair amount lately and proportional editing gets you a 'rough' morph quickly and there's a lot less actual scupting to do.

 

I'll need to look into it, then. Thanks for the tip =)

One of the renders I did not that long ago, I just picked a couple of vertices on the edge of the hair, around the ear (one or two on each layer) and with proportional on, just pulled them back,  After that it was just a tap with a smoothing bruch in sculpt mode..., repeat for other side, export, use morph loader. Done.

Yes, but with transmapped hair, at least you only need to do it once for each set of ears per hair.  And you can do a couple of short cuts if you use proportional editing.  I've been playing with hair in Blender a fair amount lately and proportional editing gets you a 'rough' morph quickly and there's a lot less actual scupting to do.

Bucket Size vs Multi-core CPU load.

I've posted else where, I'll just sum it up here. I've had some surface shaders trip over there feet and stop using all the CPU cores if the 'Bucket size' is set to small. On my 8-core CPU (8 real cores, no fake ones), I found a Bucket size of 24 to be a good balance to keep all the CPU cores doing something when working with such shaders, without it taking forever to get threw each bucket. Your computer may have a different optimum setting then mine, so testing is not a bad idea.

Another variable here is memory use. Smaller buckets (think 32) will render a little bit slower, but then the total memory usage will always be lower than if you use, say, 128. It's especially important for memory-intensive tasks like raytracing curves, and if you have 8 GB RAM or lower.

And of course, if you use a 128 bucket and the memory goes into swap, your speed gain may be lost.

Quite a few of my map sets I've made, I do make a Specular mask for just that. Some times I end up putting it in Diffuse instead, so I can see it in the view field. That also brings up the biggest pitfall for AoA and Omni when setting up stuff, you can't see the tiling in the view field without doing a spot render, and there kind of slow at that. I don't need to do a spot render of the daz default to see the patron density tiled on a shirt (for example), and it renders without any delay at all for spot renders. The Omni appears to have a three second (minimum) pause every single time for the most simple of surfaces (No velvet, No SSS, etc), lol.

I usually eyeball tiling by looking at the UV map layout of the surface (there is a "UV view" dropdown thankfully). No other DS shader but the default one seems to transfer their tiling settings to the OpenGL ones. I wonder if it's possible at all, and if yes, if it's documented somewhere because I sure wouldn't mind adding this to my shaders.

The good thing about UberSurface (as compared to AoA SSS) is that you can use those (ugly) on/off buttons to easily turn off whatever you don't need for test renders. And I have to thank Wowie for pushing me into using those buttons in my stuff, too; they're definitely handy. But ugly =) 

It's not AoA's fault, though, because I don't think Shader Mixer has those buttons.

The free HD sale doesn't appear to be working. Unless it's only for a single purchase?

The Property editor is integrated into the Parameters tab now ...
Right-click on Morph Loader and choose Edit Mode
The first icon is for Autofollow On/Off
Click on the little gear to the right to get to the Parameter settings
Here you can change the Name, Label and the Path (Path by clicking on the arrow on the right)
 

First DS version 1.2 - not in order history ...

First freebie: The Old Shoe House April 2006

First spending money: Jenna for A3 March 2007 in March Madness for $1.60 - those were Mad prices! LOL
Bought her even before I had the A3 morphs and maps - but there was the free V3, M3, A3 and H3 package at ... CNET? something like that.
It was legal, that I do remember, because I don't do pirating ... and I used Morph Manager to copy H3 morphs and empty morph channels to A3 (still have that A3Hiromorphs.cr2 in my runtimes - LOL).

I downloaded Byce, Daz and a few freebies in April 2012 but I really began to play with it at the end of that year. My first purchase was a PC membership on January 1st, 2013 but the first real items I bought were the Genesis Evolution Morph Bundle and hair (Sandy Hair, K-Nicky, Classic Rolled hair).

..well I have to for content Installs and uploading images but that is it.

I download on a Win7 computer with some serious protection on it. (It was that one that updated without permission. Apparently the best malware won't protect me from Microsquiff. Go figure.) Once my downloads have passed through that, they're safe to transfer to my art PC.

 

...not an option for me as my only other system is XP32.  I have a very beefy firewall on the Win 7 workstation.

Can't afford a "go between" system, crikey, I can't even afford  the 7 Pro OEM I need so I can upgrade the workstation's memory.

Hi Jepe....if you read this. I ended up buying all of your special effects. I knew I should have bought the bundle, but at the time I only could find 2 new releases that I wanted and you had to buy three to get all the discounts. Later I discovered there WAS another product that I did indeed want, so I COULD have bought the bundle. Anyway, I made the following picture using some of your special effects. And I also have a question...how to you use the special effects so the figure is in the middle but he is not entirely faded by the fog so to speak. Like there are effects all around him but parts of him are not partially obsurced by the fog. Like the fog (or effect) is has holes in it. I think you can do this, as you had that promo picture where the guy is behind the flood lights but the top half of his clear. Hope I explained this in a way that you understand what I am asking.

In this picture I had an effect behind him and one in front of him. There was a morph to bend the front effect back, so that's I did he wasn't all hazy.

I'm not sure what you wanted to achieve, to be honest. But if it was to get such an effect that he stands in the middle of fog with his upper body is not covered, you need a little strategic placement of the effects. Remember that that camera doesn't see everything. Especially in your case when you only have a torso shot, move the effect planes up or down and scale them. But you need effects without a sharp border. Some of the effects are meant to be back- or foregrounds with sharp cut edges, most effects are within the edges of the plane and fade to the edges. Such effects you need for this kind of scene, from the left, from the right, from above, in front or beneath.

And in Iray, please use the adjustment presets to get the effects stronger, that needs a bit of switching between Textured Preview and Iray Preview to not overdo them though.

Here's the first scene I made with SteamZ and how it actually looks in DAZ Studio viewport. 

My guess is that the item has an existing morph named Victoria 4 for some reason, and that's overriding the autofollow-generated morph.  Are you seeing this consistently with different V4 clothing items autofitted to Genesis?

Hi Jepe....if you read this. I ended up buying all of your special effects. I knew I should have bought the bundle, but at the time I only could find 2 new releases that I wanted and you had to buy three to get all the discounts. Later I discovered there WAS another product that I did indeed want, so I COULD have bought the bundle. Anyway, I made the following picture using some of your special effects. And I also have a question...how to you use the special effects so the figure is in the middle but he is not entirely faded by the fog so to speak. Like there are effects all around him but parts of him are not partially obsurced by the fog. Like the fog (or effect) is has holes in it. I think you can do this, as you had that promo picture where the guy is behind the flood lights but the top half of his clear. Hope I explained this in a way that you understand what I am asking.

In this picture I had an effect behind him and one in front of him. There was a morph to bend the front effect back, so that's I did he wasn't all hazy.

Ah, you need to find the HD morph in Parameters or shaping (look in the Curerntly Used group) and set it to zero. HD morphs slow down the pre-calculation step of the SSS shaders, so if you are too far away to see the HD details it's worth removing them. You can also apply a shader that doesn't used SSS (or switch the SSS off in the Surfaces pane) but that will markedly chaneg the appearance of the figure - check to see if there are non SSS material settings included, though, as they should give a close to intended look.

OK, another thing to check is that the problem set doesn't already have a V4 morph - though since it follows the SuperSuit that seems unlikely. In the parametrs pane option menu (the lned button in the top corner, or right-click the tab) enable Show Hidden Parameters, then cliock on the All group on the left and type Victo in the filter box - is there a Victoria 4 morph? If theer is, does it do anything?

Click the gear at the bottom of the icon for the V4 morph and select Parameter Settings, then make sure that AutoFollow is set.

Somewhat of a latecomer here. By which I mean *here*. I did purchase Bryce when it was in Beta, from the developers at MacWorld. That was in something like '91 or '92. Also purchased Poser when it was first released. (Had a lot of MetaCreation's stuff back in the day). But the fact is that I never did anything with any of it.

More than a decade later I wandered in here in late July 2009. Saw that here was where Bryce had fetched up, and paid for the upgrade from something like v. 3 to v.5 or 6. That was August 8. Then saw that Studio was a free download and bought that. That actually took, but then I bought that one with a project in mind.

I think the first content I bought was a morph pack for the kids (and probably the kids too, but they are no longer on the last page of my product library and I'm not going to go hunting them) and Noggin's Poser Owl, and it's morph pack.

But if I want to buy items for Victoria 4.2 etc...  Then I need her right?

If i look at some of the items,  they state that Victoria 4 is required.

 

That depends...if it is a morph, then most likely, altough morphs can be transfered to Genesis and Genesis 2 with the proper add-ons.  If it's clothing...then it can be transferred (with varying degrees of success/fidelity) to Genesis/Genesis2 with the included functions of Studio.  If it is textures/skins, then Genesis can use them right out of the box.

@Leana Unfortunately, for the project I'm working on, I really need a figure with a much more anime-esque appearance, particularly the eyes and face need to be anime style. But thank you. ~* Phoenix DeFalco *~

There are various anime-ish morphs available for Genesis that would be combined with the basic child morph (Hitomi comes to mind, but she's not free).

Since you're looking for anime figures Kururu for G2F and G3F might be useful to you:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/47532/kururu-for-genesis-2-female-daz-studio-4-6-only/p1

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/65066/kururu-for-genesis-3-female/p1

Let me know if you need more screen shots. I'm working on the assumption that you are probably more skilled at making morphs than I am, and using Morph Loader pro.

In 3DC, import as per pixel painintg, and use the tools in the tweak room to move your verts. Here is my very unattractive result, heh.