Cliche

(TL;DR: This is a silly composition, but I learned that I might like Iray more than I thought I would, and it might inspire me to get back into rendering.  Criticism and additional tips are welcome.)

I haven't been rendering much lately (an understatement).  Besides not having enough time, I've also been struggling getting G2F skin to look good with my Reality/Luxrender workflow.  Nothing against Reality or Luxrender, I've been using them happily for years, but something just wasn't clicking for me anymore (no doubt due to my own impatience, certainly no shortcoming of the plugin or render engine considering what others are able to do with it).

So I decided maybe it was finally time to give this newfangled Iray thing a chance, especially now that practically every Daz product includes Iray materials, which I find difficult to convert to Luxrender.  And most of the fun of 3D for me is learning how to use new techniques from a technical perspective (I'm far more engineer than artist).  So I threw together this silly scene in about twenty minutes, and started reading some tutorials on Iray materials (SickleYield has some very useful stuff, in particular).

One of my hesitations to make the jump to Iray has been the lack of on-the-fly adjustment of light groups.  This was, frankly, stupid of me, and not just because a similar functionality can be approximated with canvasses.  The real feature I didn't know I was missing was the Iray preview mode in the viewport.  As everybody probably already knew except for me, when combined with an undocked auxiliary viewport, this feature is amazing.  Now I can pinpoint areas I'm concerned about and then use the aux viewport with Iray preview mode to watch how my changes affect the actual render in near-realtime.  So when I was unhappy with the shoe sole, I created a working camera to use in the aux port, zoomed onto the shoes, and fiddled with the materials and lighting until it was fixed.  Compared with inevitably finding a material I'm unhappy with after letting Luxrender go overnight, this is a very powerful time-saver.

I didn't intend to post the result when I was creating the scene, it's not particularly interesting.  But I'm pretty happy with the result, I might have to keep learning more about Iray at this point.

Of course there are plenty of things I know can be improved (and I hope people will give me some criticism and pointers in the comments).  The specular highlights on the skin are too focused and glossy, and I was having a hard time figuring out which adjustments would fix this without eliminating specularity altogether.  The primary dress material doesn't look like the kind of fabric that would hug the model like this, it's too shiny and almost looks like leather rather than an elastic fabric.

DAZ Studio > Iray > Adobe Photoshop CS4