Help! G2M and M6 Extremely Slow Rendering-why?

Dean's Work

Hello all.

I'm still very new to all the 3D art, modeling and creation, as I have never done any of it before Feb. 2014, so please excuse my noobness.

First off, I want to say that giving away DAZ 4.6 was a brilliant move! After getting the free program, I have bought a lot of other items (way too much) from the DAZ store. I never would have done that if I had to pay $250 for the DAZ software to start. Now, I'm hooked!

So, on to the problem . . .
Concerning the attached images:
The huntress was done in 4000 x 3000 pixels, and took about 20 minutes to render with 5 characters and 2 lights. Raytrace shadows. The girl is V4.2. It was rendered as a high quality tif file. Post work in CS5.

The test girl was done at a test rate of 500 x 647 pixels, and took less than 3 minutes to render. 3 lights, and raytrace shadows. V3 and lower quality jpeg file.

The chaos view image was done in 600 x 776 pixels, and took about an hour or more. 6 lights, and raytrace shadows. V6 and M6 in jpeg format. Post in CS5, fractal was done in JWildfire and added in CS5.
When I rendered it, I noticed a problem in the clothing on the V6 girl, and I had to re-render the image. The second time, I turned off the M6 character, leaving only his armor, to get the light reflections on it. I left all 6 lights on, and raytrace shadows. Render time without M6 was about 20 minutes. I wanted to make this a larger image, at least 2000 pixels wide, but I can't even think about something that large if the male characters render that slowly.

I started another project last night with a G2M, and wanted to do a test render to check the single spotlight and shadows, and after waiting 25 minutes, it was still trying to optimize the images before rendering! I just cancelled the render, saved the project, and went to bed.

So, is this a normal problem with the newer male characters? I didn't have much problem with the Genesis ( Gen 1? ) character when I made a male figure from it, only with the newer G2 males.
I don't have any M3, M4 or M5 characters to compare render speeds with. Would I be better off getting the M3 or M4 for my projects?

Any advice would be helpful!

Thanks!

Tech stuff:
MacBook 2.26 Ghz C2D 6,1
2 GB ram
OS 10.6.8
DAZ Studio 4.6 (64 bit)

Dean's Work

Here is a screen shot of the scene that I was trying to do a test render on. 500 x 300 pixels, 1 spotlight. I wanted to see where the shadow was going to fall.

After 20+ minutes of "optimizing images," I cancelled the render.

Any ideas why I'm having problems with the new generation of male characters?

Jaderail

It sounds to me like you hit the TDLmake bug. In some textures and overlays the TDLmake can go into a loop and stay there for some users on some systems. This has been reported to DAZ 3D by many, the Error has been fixed but will not a out until the Next version Of DAZ Studio is released to the Public. I also see this error when using some textures and overlays. Here is a fast way to tell if TDLMake is looping, watch the numbers if it drops down below a number it was above and does this over and over the loop is active. It will slowly climb but is still in a loop if it does not end in minutes. You can also check the DAZ Studio Temp folder and see if the same files are being added to the end of the list in groups. The only fix is to exit DS, check that the Process really closes it may not. Then use a different texture on whatever item starts the error.