Finally able to get back to working in DAZ

After a long break from DAZ and then having to deal with a troublesome PC upgrade I'm finally back to a point where I'm able to start working on renders again. This is the first story scene I worked on today. After 3 or 4 PC crashes and issues I had with render presets in DAZ I finally got around to getting something I was pretty happy with.

The big trouble with this scene was the city environment was a very large model with many smaller objects like benches, lamp posts, newspaper boxes and a variety of buildings. It was so large I was having trouble rendering at first but then I remembered I had the Scene Optimizer script for DAZ studio. It lets you cut the texture files for any object in your scene by 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, or 1/16. I chose to cut by 1/2 and stored the new smaller textures in another folder so it doesn't destroy the original textures.

I did keep the characters and the main char at full sized textures but most of the background stuff was a minor part of the image and in the blurry area of the DOF so it didn't matter. I could have done 1/4 without any issues as well I bet but 1/2 did the trick for me. Outside of that was finding a position for the sky HDRI that didn't totally cover the woman's face with it's reflection in the front window. I liked the reflection but wanted to not be too obtrusive.