Improve the ambience in your Daz Studio life

mCasual

That's a Daz Studio preview ( openGL) render, it renders in 1 second

i had the Edit/Preferences/Interface/Per Pixel shader  option ON, because it lets me 
see the gold/chrome effects ( the balcony and door ornaments ) in preview mode

there's 2 drawbacks to that mode which i overcame here

1 - the "ambient color" and "ambient strength" settings of the surfaces have no effect

the work around: in the upper-right corner of the Diffuse Strength channel, click on the "Parameter settings" button
turn the limits OFF on that setting
set the Diffuse Strength to 150%

the walls and floors were brightened that way

note that this is not identical to "ambient" it just augments the diffuse brightness

2 - when the "Per Pixel shader"  option is off, if you create a gigantic sphere, and apply an image on its Diffuse Color channel
then set the diffuse strength to 0% and the ambient color to white and the ambient strength to 100
you get a Live !!! ( preview i mean) environment dome/sphere.

but when the "Per Pixel shader"  option is on, we only get a pitch-black sky and the solution in [1] doesnt cut it either

so ...

iRay's environment images are a special type of panoramic images called equirectangular or spherical
for iRay's needs, the HDR image format is preferred, but you can also use jpeg images and it works well
so if you want more interesting backgrounds and lights "from the sky dome" google for words like equirectangular or spherical
one place to get some with permissive licences is the sIBL archive
www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.h…

so lets say you have the Hamarikyu package of images, it contains among other things the Hamarikyu_Bridge_B_preview.jpg image

create a daz primitive sphere ( or get one as a poser prop from my site )

1000 meters diameter

lower that ball by 50000cm

the sphere is now centered at 0 0 0

apply the image to ................... the Reflection Color channel of your gigantic primitive sphere

set the reflection strength to 100%

You got a live sky dome !

but it's upside down, and rotating the sphere wont solve this

open your jpeg image in a paint program

flip it upside down, mirror it left-to-right

save it 

so that image applied to a giant mirror ball now looks like a Live SkyDome preview

Silver Dolphin

Nice tip, will try later. Thanks