few questions

DoomsdayCM

1. I have items that are supposed to have emissive areas (like tron outfits) but using the ambient section never seems to make it actually illuminate

2. I am working on a battlefield scene that has many elements such as weapons, soldiers scenery and it lags hard, is there anything to help with this, someone had mentioned "instances"

3. How do you manually add bones? Every FAQ I have seen us been confusing and unhelpful to me

Jaderail

Here is my info...
For 1: Ambient is only a glow and most of the time will only show well in a full 3Delight render not in the OpenGL render settings. For a true light to be emitted you would need to use the Uber Area light on those surfaces and set those up to work properly. Be aware Uber Area light is Shader based and needs to be set up to work well and it will increase the render time needed.

For 2: An instance is a 100% copy of the item copied, that includes textures, pose and all. They are made in the Create menu with New Node Instance (1) or New Node Instances (as many as your PC can manage). Each New Instance can be positioned and rotated but you can not change the textures or the Pose. A GeoShell is very similar but those you can change the textures on, GeoShell's are also in the Create Menu.

For 3: Adding bones is a function of Rigging. There is a public info beginners guide found here. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/creating_content/rigging/start

I hope you find this info useful.

prixat

I would use UberEnvironment with 'ILT, directional' to get Ambient effects to show up.

In this image the UE intensity was 10% or 20%. I felt the ILT needed 3 max. ray trace bounces.
The bright patches on the spheres are just default surfaces with Ambient set to 1000%