It seems to be a traditional DAZ hair mesh, with two iray uber surfaces. No strand-based or duallobe or what the new fancy stuff is called. It has a skullcap with the actual hair parented to it, like all the new dforce hairs for G9.
View attachment 4171286
This is with "ExpandAll" at 200%, so there's just nothing on the surface. The actual skull cap texture is there, the hairs are missing.
As mentioned, none of the hair options seems to restore it to working condition. Only deleting + reloading the hair itself.
I was able to get a decent result with just the good old parent to head method
Other than that, I heard some people talking about clones for g9-->g8 hair, something like "MMX Genesis 9 Clones for All"
1) Anything relaying on Mesh Smoothing makes it impossible to work on a figure. Every time you change a morph, the smoothing needs to run through yet again. To be fair, many lower quality products with few or none adjustment morphs, directly made for G8, also have this problem. Though you can temporarily turn that off with 1 click.
You're correct - which is why I would set smoothing iterations low for viewport work, then right before the production render turn up the value. Also turn off interactive update unless you like waiting 2 seconds everytime you move a figure.
RE: HDRIs and realistic lighting - the thing you need to realize, and I'm gradually growing to accept: Daz is a bad program. Its version of raytracing often feels like a cheap imitation.
If i hear you correctly, you're echoing an oft complaint of mine which is how bad it is at capturing soft light. In the real world, there are reflections EVERYWHERE. Standing outside on a summer day at noon, you can be under a porch awning, and it's still almost too bright to see a phone screen. Put the same situation in daz, and the people under the porch will be in harsh shadows, with very little contribution from reflected light - it's there, but nowhere like the real world. It basically necessitates using ghost lights everywhere, including in places you wouldnt expect to use.
Even after cranking up glossy and metallicity layers on surface shaders which you'd expect to increase total reflections; it's usually insufficient. The answer? Stop pretending daz behaves like real life, daz sucks and you gotta play by its rules.
Another problem is most HDRIs have poor full light coverage - you'd think makers could combat the above problem by just making the whole sky have a minimum emissivity; but no, when you fire them up in an exr viewer you can see; usually theyll have sharp lighting patches by the "sun" then tapering off to dark.
