Congrats. This image made Lady Heromorph's Top Images from September, 2013.

really nice work. she's lovely.

D-formers are Daz Studio's equivalent of Poser's magnets - they let you select part of a mesh and push, pull, or rotate it around a point, with configurable fall-off. Lyrra Madrill has sets of pre-made ones available through Daz that you can use to add morphs to clothing that doesn't have them - I use those a good bit, but I also create and work with them directly to correct poke-through, reshape bits, and so forth.

I think I used eight of them here, not counting the ones I used from Lyrra's sets. One was to narrow the waist of the corset a bit, three were to adjust her skirt to go under the belts and purse properly, another was to pull the strap of the purse down where it went over her shoulder so it wasn't hovering over it (since the clothes it was designed to go with were thicker there), another to shape the way the strap went over her breast, and two to shape the belts so they fit better to the skirt and weren't sticking out to the sides. There may have been another one or two I'm forgetting.

It's taken me a lot of experimenting to start to get comfortable with Reality and LuxRender, and a lot of the time I still feel like I'm just feeling my way. They seem to work well with the skin setup that I liked to use with Daz's Renderer, which is this:

Set all the skin areas to be "skin" for the rendering model. Set the specular color to pure white, and the specularity to 50%. Set the specular strength to around 20%, experimenting a bit to see what looks good.

A lot of times, things will have way too high reflectivity in Lux - the skirt here started out looking like it was very shiny plastic, so I had to tone that down a lot. On the boots and collar, I used the leather settings from the Bump-O-Matic product that used to be on Renderosity - I think it's no longer available, sadly. Those were too reflective as well, and the color wasn't as dark in Lux, so I had to adjust them. While I was doing that, I tried setting the collar to velvet, and I liked the effect it had, so I left it that way.

I've pretty much abandoned using all the light setups I used to use in Studio - my scenes are usually outdoor or character studies, so I use a single Sun light. Lux will let me tweak the strength of the "Sun" and "Sky" parts of that separately, so I'll often play with that to see what effects I can get. I also find that I almost always have to turn up the postscale in the tone mapping (I've had the most success with the Reinhard/non-linear tonemapping).

I generally align the sun by using the option to use your light as a camera - makes it much easier for me to get the angle I want.

Lastly, since Lux tries to simulate real light, I find that realistic setups work better. It *loves* transparency, I'm finding - I really love what it did with the lace and the gauzy sleeves there. When I was first trying it out, I kept doing renders of just the figure and clothes, and not liking what I was getting - when I started adding scenery, though, it got much better. Even just a simple pair of square primitives for a floor and backdrop help a lot, since you start to get light bouncing around the way it should.

For this, I used the shadow bowl that's a freebie from Most Digital Creations. Gave me a nice plain white backdrop, with a bit of interest from the shadow, and it's curved, so there are things to the left and right of the character bouncing the light around.

Reality seems to do a pretty good job of setting up the materials for you, but it's not perfect. I sometimes wind up manually setting things that should be transparent to be nulls (e.g., her left glove is the same glove as her right one, just with all the "armor" leather part material zones set to be nulls). A lot of the metal bits on her costume I had to manually set to be metal, and I manually set the bottles in her bag to be glass.

Beyond that, I recommend a lot of test renders and patience! I got Reality when it first came out, tried it several times, couldn't get the results I wanted, and set it aside for a while. I kept seeing the renders other people were doing, and finally decided to try it again, and play around with it until I started to get something good. The first Reality render I did that I really liked was Alyssia, which I posted here, so it took me probably four or five months of actually playing with it once a week or so before I felt I had anything good enough to show off!

This is awesome... Nicely done, two questions... What are D-Formers, and what am I doing wrong with Lux that I can't get it to look this good...

Don't ya just hate how that "out of the box" stuff never fits right?! Great job fixing the fits. Really a stunningly beautiful image, knew it was Lux at 1st glimpse, keep saying I'm gonna try it (yeah, I got it installed and everything). Excellent!

Dude! this is freakin AWESOME. I will send you a pm with more questions.