TheBrain wrote:I'm not familiar with the plugin you mention, but generally there's not a large amount of performance difference between 32 bit and 64 bit, unless memory usage is a bottleneck. The simple fact is that renders like these require a lot of processing power (I'm guessing this took several hours?, but they do look very nice :P).
I found with the standard DAZ renderer (using a homemade ambient occlusion light shader) that disabling AO for hair saves a large amount of time. Using less complex lighting can help too (for example, using directional/point/ambient lights instead of uberenvironment2 in DAZ4). Of course I don't know how much control Reality gives you to do stuff like that. Other than that, just use low quality renders while you're trying out and posing stuff, and only switch to higher settings (and/or a different renderer) for the final rendering.
As you say, the only difference you'll get between 32- and 64-bit versions is addressable memory. More memory equating to more complex geometry in the scene, which means more figures, props, etc.
Depending on what you need/want the final image for you can get some pretty decent results from the native DAZ Studio render engine (3Delight) with just using the standard, in-built lights - distant lights, spot lights, etc. What Uber Environment does is provide a means of generating the ambient light you get in real life with light being bounced around off all surfaces. You can also use a HDRI (actually , technically, I think it's just a LDRI) which will act as a light source. What Reality does is act as a clever interface between DAZ Studio and the open source unbiased render engine LuxRender. What that means is that Reality will take your DAZ scene, have a damned good stab at material conversion (you can manually tweak) before passing all that on to LuxRender. Where LuxRender scores is the fact that it is unbiased, which means it treats lights like lights. Sounds obvious but - that means no need to try and get ambient lighting to match real life, LuxRender does that because light is treated like light, it will generate ambience automatically. If it is there in the scene it will cause shadows or cast shadows - because in real life light will always cause shadows to be cast (in DAZ you can turn that off on a light-by-light basis), and if you have something in the scene it will cast shadows because that is what things do when hit by light! The downside of all this are the re-thinking of your lighting policy/style, a need to tweak materials in Reality, time - Reality renders can be lengthy. Upsides are the fact you can pause and resume your renders as and when you like, plus you can network your renders for more speed.
In my view, Reality/LuxRender are another tool in the box, to be used at the appropriate time. Not all my renders are done via Reality (in fact not many are!) as I can still produce output I am happy with using the 'vanilla' tools build in to DAZ Studio.