seachnasaigh posted at 8:24 PM Sun, 22 June 2025 - #4497305

The great majority of the lighting is mesh lighting;  might that account for lack of ambient occlusion?

Something I noticed when sunlight bounces into my home off of my car's windshield, vs. direct sunlight.

Then sun is something like 1.25-1.5 degrees wide in the sky.  (So is the Moon, btw.)  This makes the light from the sun more like a spotlight or a small mesh light, and the shadows are softer, more diffuse. You can get the same effect from artificial lighting.

The sunlight bouncing off the curves of my windshield, because the curves change the image of the sun, make it more like a point light, and the shadows are sharp edged, cleaner.  It's more like a penlight flashlight.

I suspect that it's because a  penlight is a narrow beam, so you get less interference: the left side (and the upside, of course) doesn't illuminate the opposite right side nearly as much.  The larger the light source, the more cross illumination you get, and therefore, the fuzzier the shadows.  Or such is my hypothesis.

I have never experimented with this in Poser (and in Firefly, it might not make much difference), so I have no idea if this will help or not.  You might want to see if you get ambient occlusion in artificial light to see if it works in real life or not.