Settings Daz3d

Rendering Quality Enable: ALWAYS off
Max Time: always increased (number varies)
Caustic Sampler: always on
Firefly: Enabled
Bloom filter: Depends on the scene. Is it outdoorsy and sunshine-y? Or dream like? Or foggy?

Tone mapping: Only if in render something is off.
Luminance: Absolutely dependant from render to render because I never can predit how my lighting will go until I begin to see some of the pixels rendered.

Preferred: HDRI or Lighting from environments

Rendering sizes: dependant on single figure portrait, single figure complicated background, simple background, multiple figures and simple or complicated background and so on.

3k pixels usually.

Complicated backgrounds (forests, foliage, outdoors, lots of greenery) with multiple figures -- depends. Usually I try 3k but render the grass + light. Then remove it then the trees. Then just 1 figure at a time (keeping the same lights) and layer them in photoshop. If my comp can't handle that, it's 1920x1080, and if not that, then it's 1000 pixels. I don't personally like smaller. I don't know why.

I also apparently like pushing my comp to the limit and playing the "how many times can it crash before I figure out how to break up and render whatever part is making it crash on it's own until i can bring it together in photoshop" game.

@eelgoo Nope, there's a firefly filter in DAZ? It's in...Filtering :p

I like to get rid of the regular lighting and use Sun-Sky Only, then just kinda experiment with the time of day and color of the sun etc... still trying to figure out a good moonlit setting w/o an out of the box solution, so i can understand and control it.

And don't forget the environment tab... sometimes i just can't figure out why the heck my bacground is jacked up, then ohhhh, lol, forgot to fix the environment tab.

Also, i crank settings up to max samples 99999, quality 100%, but only now since times are reduced with new graphics card.

And shutter speed, F/Stop and ISO to get good depth of field and natural lens effects.

One thing i have noticed is that render settings sometimes don't stick from app open to app open. So once you get something you like for a certain scene, remember to save it as a preset or create a folder for that scene and save custom settings there. I got so tired of doing a render, then be like the next day, oooh i want to change that, and never be able to get that same lighting or render effect again.

I think that it is wise to keep it simple.
It gets easier to learn what does what then.
Not that I have managed to master it anyway, of course :0/

It's my understanding that the various options in the progressive rendering are primarily for setting stop points for the render. My understanding is that the max samples for example is the number of rendering iterations before it forces a stop itself. The majority of my better renders hit around 5000 iterations or more before I stop them.

I always render with Render Quality: off Max time: 0 max samples: 15000 as I do not want my system to stop rendering until I tell it to stop.

I've noticed that setting render cams to DoF, or turning on architectural or caustic samplers slow me down significantly. DoF can be so slowing that I'm going to start doing that sort of thing in post rather than rendering it. And only use optimizations when needed.

But I'm still new, learning and paying attention as I try different things in different environments. As I will have time this week, I'm going to do a lot of water experimenting and see what sort of fun things I can manage.