Yes, Sir... Please do watch and read some of those tutorials. Right off the bat, some of the major reasons Daz might be rendering in iRay forever are:
-Lots of emitter type lights. iRay fights with them. If you don't know what I mean, search Daz Emitters.
-Night scenes. iRay thrives off a LOT of light. Search out on DeviantArt "Shooting day for night" by CrissieBrown to learn some effective tips on night/dusk/overcast shots.
-You have a LOT of models in your scene. A handful of characters fully kitted with clothes and hair, a full scene model (room, island, spaceship, etc) with lots of props... Stuff that adds 'geometry' and lots of it. This makes rendering take longer... And really hurts how easy it is to move stuff in your viewport even with texture shaded mode set. There are some intermediate-skill-level things you can try to offset this, but practice the basics first. For now, try and hide any walls/ceilings that aren't in your camera shot.
-Resolution. If you are struggling on time, set your render resolution to something less than 1080p... At least while you are practicing.
-Your render settings aren't really set ... er, well? This happens to all of us. Daz has a BYZANTINE UI. Seriously, read Sicklyield's tute on 'progressive render settings'. Then read EVERYTHING YOU CAN FIND on render settings
-You have quality settings ON in render settings, and your convergence rate is set to 100%. It is NOT POSSIBLE for 100% convergence to be achieved by iRay, or probably any other render engine/driver/what-have-you. I recommend no higher than 99.8 for this.
-You have quality settings ON in render settings, and your quality number is greater than 1. This setting basically tells Daz when to stop a render, because it calculates when a pixel (yes, one pixel each) is 'finished' (read: It's convergence ratio has reached the setting you put in convergence rate, above) , and increasing this value increases render times linearly because iRay is working harder to converge every. Single. Pixel. In your shot. At 1, it's 'standard' render times. At 2, it's twice as long as 1. At 3, it's thrice as long as 1, etc (or something like that... Check what Sickleyield and WPGuru have to say about this; Math and I don't get along x.x). Just know that the higher your quality settings are... The longer you'll wait for a render... But, the less fireflies you'll have. BUT. Night renders in iRay tend to have MUCH more fireflies even at higher quality levels due to (usually) not much light coming in that iRay feeds on. This is why I recommend the 'shooting day for night' tutorial above, to help with this.
There's more, of course... after a month, it's simple enough to get 'okay' at Daz. But... It's gonna take WAY more than that to get
really good. Depends on how far you wanna take it.
One last thing: Even when you set Daz to render via GPU... When you are NOT rendering (i.e., you're in your viewport, adding characters, clothes, dialing those tits up to deliciously huge levels, adding that hot Golden Palace to your sexpot-in-waiting G3 or G8F), EVERYTHING is controlled by your CPU. Scene set-up. Arranging shit in your viewport. Setting up your scene in the viewport. All of this. Your GPU does not kick in until you either turn your viewport to 'iRay' (gpu kicks in now) or you hit 'render'... And even then, your CPU is what pre-loads everything in your scene into the render! Your GPU does not kick in when you hit 'render' until your CPU has written all the geometries and textures and whatnot that are in your scene, and when this is done, iRay is finally ready to render... And now and ONLY now is when your GPU takes over (during the render process, and all the way to it's end).
If you find it, make sure you set the 'optiX' option on for ALL renders you do in iRay if you have a strong video card. I might have spelled that wrong. Just search iRay Optix.
Also, and totally the last thing: if you are using multiple things with the same textures (lots of individual grass blades, a room with lots of walls with the same textures, a gang of goblins with the same skin textures face-raping some happless woman in a dungeon), then try to set your rendering to 'Memory' instead of the 'Speed' setting so many people recommend. Setting it to 'Memory' in times like this allows Daz to write textures and stuff to memory, and if they are used more than once (multiple instances of that thing), it can help to reduce render times in iRay.
Okay. That's it for me. Read, watch tutes! I need a beer and some TV (insert Al Bundy meme here xD )
Cheers, bro... Have fun!
...And you're quite welcome, brother
