Hexagon Washing to Downgrade Shaders

MW_HNL

I have only been working with DAZ3d for about 9 months.  I am using  a MacMini, pumped up as much as it can be but still render challenged.  Also I have been trying to play with animation.  Result has been a fascination with how render times are determined.  Ergo a new love of Gen4 characters.  And the DAZ default setup for materials and shaders.  And for cubesites, small sets.  Like the great Deco series.  (getting to the point)...

I tried to use Collective 3d room creator to make a simple set of three walls a floor and a ceiling and a ceiling light, 4 wall sockets and the nifty heater grate in the floor.  12 minutes Render time!  (using a not that beefed up 800x600 render set I use to now test everything as I research surfaces and other things that make massive differences in renders.)  This set uses some kind of fancy surface definitions.  It is super neat of course!  No complaints.  And it makes rooms very easily.  But how to "smack it around" and downgrade all its surfaces?

I tried this on one wall since I use Hexagon 2.5 quite a bit, great companion to DAZ3d. I thought of the nightmare of doing this on all the components!  Then I tried just making an entire room the way I wanted it in DAZ3d with the Collective 3d set and exported it 10% size as an obj file to desktop so it will fit easily in Hexagon 2.5. (if you don't reduce them they end up in Hexagon massive size and I find dumping an obj file to desktop less prone to funny business than the direct send to Hexagon and you get to close DAZ3d and get RAM back before you work in Hexagon) Boy do I want a MacPro for Christmas!

Now I imported it to Hexagon 2.5  Wow of course, surfaces and materials everywhere!  But I did not touch anything.  I simply tunred around and exported it as an obj under a different name and of course enlarged it 10x.  Crossed fingers as Hexagon can have problems with big files and decide to just quit occasionally.

I got several meterial files the OBJ and the MC6.  Went right back into DAZ3d.  I had tested with the previous just one wall experiment that I could use that wall exactly like any other wall in the Collective 3d set.

Of course we now had several dozen surfaces to tweak.  Mostly 100% on some sliders that were making all the walls glow like lighting panels and applied the few textures to entire groups of surface.  But be in low hold.

What previously rendered in 12 minutes now cranked out with the same settings and even some distance lights in 33 seconds.  Normally this loss of fancy surface definitions would be considered a negative but here it apparently did exactly what I wanted.  Downgraded all surfaces at once to DAZ default shaders.

So is this the hard way to do this?  Am I missing anything?  This seems to work for downgrading all sorts of things to work with the wide range of Daz default shader setups. 

I nicknamed it Hex Washing.  Now I worry my inexperience is causing me to miss how to do it more easily or some artifact I am creating etc.

Aloha

Mike in Hawaii