bagginsbill posted at 10:39AM Mon, 21 August 2017 - #4312628

I have been using the more modern settings so long I wasn't sure what to suggest, so I went back to using things the way we did 10 years ago, which I'm pretty sure is how you're using them. And there I found all the problems why we don't do things that way.

Here's a setup using an Image Based Light (IBL), Ambient Occlusion (AO) for shadowing, no gamma correction (GC), and no Indirect Diffuse Light (IDL).

Observe the artifact in the armpit and elbow. This is not glow. It is a missing AO shadow. AO is not functioning correctly here. The skin is not brighter than other skin, but rather the SHADOW is not DARKER like it should be.

I could not find any value for the AO settings that corrected this. I'm not surprised. The AO function was written LONG before scatter was. I doubt SM even cared if scatter didn't work very well with AO. Anybody interested in realism enough to use scatter would also NOT be using AO.

Now - let's more forward in time. Instead of AO (which I turn off) I use IDL. And for the thousands time, IBL + IDL works great - nobody is permitted to suggest this is a bad combination. It is a good combination. We may prefer an EnvSphere instead of IBL but IBL in and of itself DOES WORK RIGHT with IDL.

With this setup, the shadowing problems in crevices are completely gone. However, overall the lighting is incorrect because I'm not yet using GC. Let's add GC.

There - a proper result is achieved merely by clicking two checkboxes.

So - stop doing things the way we did in 2007. You have scatter, GC, and IDL, all of which were added specifically to FIX problems. So you should use them to fix those problems.

While I do thank and appreciate you for helping me with this, I still haven't tried it yet because I haven't been on to render today but I'll try it in a few minutes. At any rate I appreciate the help but you made it sound like I was intentionally using a crappy feature when clearly I wasn't, that's why I've been asking everybody that still use poser if they knew what it was because everyone else switched to DAZ, and I don't know anyone using DAZ that ever had that issue. I kept assuming it was just Poser not being able to handle SSS properly because people kept telling me a lot of vendors used an outdated fake method with the nodes to get SSS to work in versions of Poser that didn't have it or something. Yet no one would tell me which nodes were causing it, I do remember you saying something like Fast Scatter will do it, but I never see FS in the material room or anything turned on in the Ambient boxes either. The only AO I see turned on is usually on the lights in the parameter box which is on mostly HDRI or IBL lights. ANy other way to shut off AO I wouldn't know anything about it besides it being checked on lights, usually lights labeled Sunlight or HDRI, or IBL.

I honestly had no idea or clue what was causing the problems with shadows. I call it a glow because that's what it looks like to me, a glow. Though I was quite sure people would have known what I was talking about because Iv'e seen other posts similar to mine on DAZ and elsewhere with people having the same issue refer to it as a glowing on skin error.

One person even admitted to following your instructions and they still saw the glowing problem in those areas or other areas. But I will have to see it for myself before I can make a judgement call on it. Someone once said that Shadow Bias was the cause of it, but I don't know there is no denying that you don't know what you are talking about because I've heard your name pop up in almost every single forum I've ever sought help on, so the legends about your knowledge on this stuff and beyond had to be all true. So thank you. I also never use Indirect Lighting, that sh*t is just too damn slow sometimes to pass, especially when I have a lot of figures in a scene, so I never bother to use it. Plus I rarely see much of a difference anyway with it and have gotten acceptable renders without it.