Renderer works, then doesn't (3Delight)
This is something weird that keeps happening, and I am not sure why. I will render, or spot render parts of a picture I am working on, and everything is working fine. Then suddenly the renderer will come up, count the time, but it's not actually rendering anything, whether I try to do this in the viewport as a spot render or a new window full render. Why, why does this keep happening? I even closed out DAZ twice and opened it again. I'm only using 3 lights, and as said before the renderer was fine... then I changed one thing in the scene, went to spot render... and now it's not rendering anything in spot render (I finally managed to edit that one small area by re-rendering the whole picture again. Ridiculous ~_~)
Comments
How long are you waiting? With SSS shaders, especially on items with HD morphs, there can be a substantial wait while the renderer performs a pre-render caclulation stage. If your change was to add an HD morph, or an SSS shader, to an item that didn't have one before that might be the issue.
With the AoA SSS shader, I've seen pre-render calculations take 10 minutes or more...(that's with AoA and HD morph).
Occasionally this has happened to me too. Every time it does it to me, waiting is pointless; I have found it will *never* render... at least, not within a reasonable time frame (I once waited overnight one time with no success). As a precaution i always save the scene as a .duf before i do a render of it. Then, when this freeze-up happens, i can simply shut DAZ off, start it back up, and re-load the scene. This has always eliminated the problem for me whenever it occurs. Costs a few minutes but it beats waiting for the darn thing to go by itself. I haven't noticed such freeze-ups happen since i installed version 4.8 though.
Yes you can try switch SSS off in all the materials to see if this come from that, this is totally possible.
I also could not stand the freeze at the start of rendering, I'm not of a patient nature. For information, "Amazing Skins" product for 3delight were done in order to prevent that (amongst other things). This uses an approximation for SSS. It has speed advantages, SSS is here, but in an approximated version, the drawback of this approximation being you cannot reach translucency with it. If you don't have Amazing skins, you can also try to swap to OmUber shader, the render time for HD is better than the one for AoA... I think it is also better in term of initial freeze but it was a long time ago I made these tests, so I'm not totally sure.
Sorry what is HD? High Definition? (I really don't get what is different about characters marked as HD--they look thecsame as regular characters to me).
I am using AoA's SSS for the skin, yes; but that is not the change. And I started saving my skins as .png instead of .jpeg; will this matter?
As for how long I'm waiting, it doesn't seem to render at all
I might need to look into the Amazing Skins--thanks!