Thank You guys!

so that's a final image. I've added a bit of EmFluid. As I heard from experienced people in this field, there should be a city in the background, or some smoke instead . Particles were rendered as 'lightweight' point particles, as 3delight automatically uses this mode with point particle shape.

Cheers

huge picture...

great character^^

That's looking great!

I'm still sitting here with no 3Delight. I keep getting the error 5050 licence error and can't figure it out. I've posted many times on their forum but they seem to have no intention of helping which doesn't bode well if I purchased a license and then needed support.

Thank You!

Well I'm probably the last person on this planet with some usable knowledge about networks and services, but anyway: that I know, exactly the same message can appear if a free version of standalone 3delight is running in the same time with free plugin for SI (which seems to be logical, otherwise four cores would be allowed).
But I think you don't have a standalone 3delight installed. So my very wild guessing, is that SI plugin recognizes *something* as 'another copy of itself'. Now, what this is... I don't know.

@ActionArt - Could it be there is still a rogue "license.dat" or "rendermn.ini" on your computer from an earlier install?

Like you say, I think it must think that something else is 3Delight or there is a stray file from a previous version but I don't know what or where it is. I've tried everything I can think of.

I have SI 2011 and 2012 installed but 2011 doesn't have 3Delight installed and I've searched the whole system for any files that might be related. This is the only computer in the shop with SI on it. I also tried putting it on 2011 but got the same thing.

@Harazi - There doesn't seem to be unless it's hiding really well.

i REALLY like 3delight and i'm rendering some hair/fur right now with shadow maps. but processing those takes quite a bit of time...
is there a way to save shadowmaps like FG maps? so that it writes them once and then could just read the maps...

well that should be 'render shadow maps' option in global render options, you just turn it off, once shadow map is generated. If you want just one shadow map across multiple frames, remove [frame] from shadow map name - of course this assumes non-moving objects.
There is also a 3delight 'light property' for settings per individual light.

However if you're using colored shadows, it seems that color is saved too.

NICE! thank you.
that assumes non-moving objects AND cameras, right?
I don't completely understand what could be changed without the need of regenerating the maps.
I think tuning a hairshader or lights intensity should work with the same map, but things like changing the length of the hair or the position of the lights needs to generate new maps, right?
it's not too well documented in the SI manuals...

EDIT: 3delight Manual:
A good use of this toggle is to set
it to ‘off’ after rendering the shadows once (since when lights do not move,
there is no need to re-generate shadows). There is a more fine-grained control
over shadow map generation in the light properties page (see Section 4.4 [Light
Properties], page 24).

without 'AND cameras' - you can move the camera..... you can try it, just render a small scene with a few objects, turn of 'render shadow maps', hide some objects, render it again..
there's another option under 'Diagnostic', 'display shadow maps with i-display' or something like that, that will show your shadow maps, just after creation. btw, shadow maps are some kind of z-depth images, rendered from lights, instead of 'final' camera.