So I am new to Daz 4.9, I haven't used Daz since 3, and can't figure out why my scene is pitch black in the preview window. I loaded a character, some clothes and hair, even loaded environment and a spotlights, but my character is pitch black, I can't see anything. Is there something I'm missing when starting a new scene? I'm using Daz 4.9 Pro on Mac OS high sierra. I have included a screen shot so you can see what I see

It's looks like it is because you have the viewport in Cartoon Mode and the Spotlight you have added is shining behind your model, not on to it.

Trying moving the spotlight back along the z axis and see if that helps.

Okay I double-checked the viewport little thingy that you were saying was on cartoon mode and it's actually on texture shaded and I moved the spotlight like you suggested but now I instead of having a black everything I have a gray everything no textures are loading whatsoever

I am just referring to the screenshot you showed above.

Have you apply a material preset to the objects as some do load without any applied.

Perhaps if you could show another screenshot it may help.

Yes I did try applying different textures to the items that were in the scene and I still got a black screen apparently it's because I needed to have it set instead of to texture shaded I needed to have it on Nvidia Iray because once I did that then my texture showed up but like I stated before I have not used studio since Daz 3 so back then you clicked on that little globe and you switched it to texture shaded if you wanted to see the textures in real time ?. But I appreciate the effort in trying to help me figure it out ?

You should be able to see the textures in texture shading mode also.

Another thing to try if your scene is dark with texture shading mode active, is pressing Ctrl L which sets the light mode to Preview Lights as opposed to scene lights.

Nvidia Iray mode is great if you have the computer power to handle it, but it can be pretty resource intensive and may slow down with camera movement on a large scene as it is continuously renderering the scene.

I do have the preview lights on and I still can't see textures when texture shaded is chosen

Hmm ok, It's pretty hard to figure out exactly what is going wrong here.

For example when I start DS and load a genesis figure(and some pants) this is what I see. Is it possible to post a screenshot of what you see on a default load, maybe it will help to narrow down the issue?

Yes I can if you can give me a few because my poor little MacBook pro laptop is pretty hot right now from trying to do a render earlier so I'm letting her cool off before I do anything else but I will definitely upload a couple of screenshots for you and hopefully that will help figure out what's going on ?

Here are the screen shots of what happens when I load Gen8 into a scene after opening Daz. Note in the 1st one you can see that preview lights are on

Thanks, I'm having a bit of a look around for any info. No luck so far but will keep going.

If it appears to be rendering correctly with Nvidia mode, It could be an issue with OpenGL which drives the viewport display. I can't say for sure this is the issue as I haven't been able to find the same issue anywhere else. So all I can do is go with my intuition on this one.

You can have a look at what is happening with your display interface settings in DS by going to preferences/interface/current hardware features. Which should bring up something like this which will show individually is and isn't supported by your hardware just to rule that out as the issue.

Let me know if anything stands out. You can also check your log file under Help/Troubleshooting/View log and see if there appears to be any obvious errors there.

Okay I don't understand what happened but I went to my settings in interface to match yours I looked at my hardware capabilities where you showed me to look for it and my graphics card supports it all but I changed my settings to match yours and I cleared the scene started a new scene loaded gen 8 and boom she loaded with textures so it must have been something set up in the tab that you told me to look at that was causing the issue weird but thank you so much for helping me figure it out ?

That's awesome! Glad you have it sorted!