3 easy tricks - Enhance your Hardware renders and previews

mCasual

First you have to go in Edit/Preferences/Interface and turn on the "Per Pixel Shading" option

 

Trick 1, get Ambient/Self illumination to work

You will notice that when "Per Pixel Shading" option is On, you lose the Ambient channel's usual effect

so, for the red hair here

1 - set the Specular channel to White ( or try with colors or try with texture inmages ), Specular Strength at 100%

2 - set the Reflection Strength to 100%

there you go ! the material now self illuminates!

Trick 2, Chrome and Gold  effects

As you can see on the Trooper-Aiko3, we can have fake chrome/reflective effects in Hardware renders and the 3D Viewport

1 - set the specular color to white, strength 100%, set glossiness at 100% 

2 - set Reflection color white, strength 100%

3 - apply an image to the reflection color channel

in my case i applied a 360 degrees panoramic photo of a beach from sIBL archive

when i want to make gold metals, i use an image like this and i add a gold tint to the reflection color and/or the specular color 

 

Trick 3 get a Live ! Environment Sphere/Dome

1 - create a huge sphere, example, 100 meters diameter

2 - lower the sphere until its center is at ground level, in my case it means move it 5000 centimeters down the Y Axis

3 - set the specular color to white, the specular strength to 100%, the glossiness to 100%

4 - apply a spherical image to the specular color channel

5 - set the reflection color to white, reflection strength to 100%

There you go ! Note that the effect works best if your camera stays close to the center of the  sphere

the default iRay environment image that comes bundled with Daz Studio 4 works for this purpose, find it in your folders :

C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\shaders\iray\resources\DTHDR-RuinsB-500.hdr

the sIBL is my great rresourcefor those 360 panoramas ( called spherical or equirectangular format )

http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html

MilosGulan

Thank You so much mCasual, tips 2 and 3 are great. I will have to try using those spherical panoramas in my pictures.