I have noticed that a lot of 3D renders seem really grainy. Is that a default setting in DAZ, or are people actually setting the renders to look like that? I have seen a lot of great work that, IMO, are ruined by grainy renders.
I'd like some insight on this.

A lot of the time that can happen due to several reasons
1. poor system requirements
2. They do not allow the image to finish rendering, again depending on how good the system determines the time it will take.
3. Lighting and or poor use of fog effects/ filters
There may be more, but this is the top 3 I see.

I have been guilty of a few of these in the past, that is why when I do a render now, I will take time for multiple previews after i make any changes to lighting, camera or props. Sometimes I will render them out 4 hours at a time, if I like where it it is going,I will cancel it and let it go til I see it is done.

DW can certainly speak more to the technical aspects than I as I haven't done a rendered image in over a year and a half so I'll just give my dumbed down view.
I had noticed back then was this whole grainy render thing happening, myself. It seemed to be largely the result of using a more powerful render engine like the "Reality" plug-in at the time. It produced more spectacular results but rather than doing the fairly quick and complete line by line render that Daz's default renderer (at that time, anyway) produced, it produced a a scattering of pixels which became denser and more complete the longer the render went on.
The problem seemed to come from exactly what DW had mentioned... time, PC horsepower, etc., leading to a lot of less than complete renderings using that engine, giving things a grainy look when all the pixels hadn't yet filled in.

That makes sense. Thanks. But it won't keep me from overlooking that grain when I am looking at 3D. It's the same way I am about photomanips and shitty edges. LOL

Heck, that massive image I did for call to arms,I broke down to about 10-11 different renders with 2 characters each render using the Light dome pro for rendering. If I had tried all 22 characters my system would have literally been fried. It screamed in pain with just two characters at a time. Once I was done then I did post work to combine them to the single image.

I agree with the main culprit being system resources.
Too much going on in the background processes is usually what leaves mine with a grain appearance.

Speaking strictly for myself, the rest is general laziness on my part. I get involved in too many things at a time, then rush to finish a project just to have something to post. Heck, I even skip the photoshop touch up in a lot of cases just to "complete" the project.
It's nothing I couldn't fix if I spent a little more time with each one, or bothered to turn off some of the background programs during rendering. Again, just speaking for myself--because I know my system can handle it, if I let it, even though I could use an upgrade to the graphics card....

I used to render something in pieces to eliminate this, and then patch them all together in photoshop for the finished project, but I let too many life distractions get in the way, and skip the fine tuning steps.
My last submission is a great example--one quick render, two minutes in photoshop, got tired of working on it, and submitted. Grain in the skin tones especially evident. Even two years ago I would have rendered each character separately, then the background, then all (just to get shadows close), then stitched and sewed together in PS for touch up and final lighting.

Now lighting and FX is another issue. I still ain't got the hang of those in Daz, so I usually try to "fix" those in photoshop.
Again, laziness, if I spent some time learning lighting techniques, instead of trial and error until I find a setting I can "live with", they might work out better.

But this is a great question as well constructive criticism...and I am glad this was brought up!

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I do the Shutting everything down that is not needed when I do the serious pieces. I disable all updates, internet access, and and all programs that do not pertain to my rendering. once I am offline,I even disable antivirus

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Exactly! Even all the help manuals, forums and articles I've read suggest all of that. I'm going to start doing that again so as to bring my renders close to the standards seen in yours...

And let me again re-iterate, the system being the main culprit of sloppy renders, is still only a machine. It's my laziness that lets the system rule.
Time for me to take control back! Time to end the reign of the machine! Vive la révolution!
in other words- time for me to stop being lazy.

honestly i've only had 1 grainy render. i used the iray renderer on my pc.i chalk it up to bad lighting and a limited knowledge of iray settings.lately though i've been having wierd crashes and errors that came from a compressed runtime.
i'm not so sure the hardware debate is entirely valid though.my laptop only has about 3gb of memory but i've been able to render fairly easily.until recently.it seems daz doesn't like any file that is compressed. compression (windows way to save space) causes files to appear smaller which imo causes all kinds of wierd errors like textures missing or .png iccp warnings maybe even grain (can't vouch for that though). that i think causes windows to work overtime looking for a way to put things in order.my guess is that is what kills the memory. maybe i'll do a tut sometime if anybody's interested. keep in mind this is all theoretical on my part. i was just lucky to be able to fix some issuse i've been having
anyhoo daz is about to release 4.11 which is supposed to eleviate a lot of the wierdness. be ez peeps

That's a lot of great info. Thanks!!
I wish DAZ handn't gone to a proprietary file system. I don't want to switch to DAZ, but it looks like I might have to. I do so little 3D that I will probably stay with V4 and Poser.
Good to know the graininess might be fixed in the next update. It seems that DAZ is a system hog, from what y'all are saying, and I don't have a very powerful MAC. SOOOOOO......

I'd be more than interested in any tut that would help me understand lighting better!

I'll admit to being lazy, but I'll apply that especially to studying lighting techniques. I find one or two I'm comfortable with, and tend to render everything with those.

As for the iray settings, unless I'm using the sun-sky only, the only ones I mess with (experimentally, of course, not commitments) are the max samples and max time in the Progressive rendering section of the render editor. Both of those, to my limited understanding, help the render achieve better resolution through time and progression.
If I use the sun-sky setting, I actually looked up my location coordinates so I can reset the time of day and date settings to pick a sunlight setting that I've seen in real life...The rest is guess work and trial and error.

There's got to be a better way....

yeah daz does use some power.like i was saying i've been rendering on about 3 gb's on my laptop on the norm.i've read daz 'needs' about 4 for good renders. my pc on the other hand has 7.render times haven't really shortened or lengthened.my longest render was 24 hours due mostly because i set the settings higher than i usually do.the memory was more than enough howevever. i really am apt to believe daz has a lot running in the background like the database psql thingy that kinda slows computers down.
there are some fabulous renders out there no doubt. dazer's aren't known for giving out a lot of their real secrets.so you'll never really find out how they get their 'realistic' renders.even before the whole iray/reality/nvidia additions there were close to photograph level renders out there.some of those same artists have left comments on my images that have me thinking we're all reaching for that one magic image. that one omg render. in reality we're all the bob ross's of our craft.how we get there is just a matter of imho which brand of paint brush we choose to be our favorite just like all the other artists before us.

That graininess that's IRay. It gives the image a more "Photo-realistic" look and d usually does a great job and the Grain can be filtered out but the render times for IRay are insane most times. Iray is useless for animation or quick turnover. The ambient occlusion is to blame and if it's reduced that effect is lessened to some degree. I have tried IRay and I don't like particularly like it. 3Delight works just as well except for the glow effect that IRay has which can turn ANY surface into a light source...that's pretty badass. I wish Iwas better at it and had a more powerful system but I don't 4 GB VRAM and 16 GB RAM aren't enough to make my renders fast enough to be worth the switch...but I have tons of IRay plugins and add ons as well as shaders and lights and so on. I'll be ready to switch when the time comes...for now they need to render faster while maintaining quality.