I'm beginning to have some success at taking the edge of the default IBL settings. This is a single diffuse IBL with AO, a specular only highlighter and two negative intensity spots to cast some 'darkness' AO settings Max Dist = 0.49 Bias = 0.05 Samples = 20 The spots are at -50% intensity

And a close up

Hey Tbird - I think that looks like one hell of lighting job! Really nice. Personally, I'd say it looks better than most of the Hypereal I've seen.

except for the fact that the skin seems to be 'too perfect' I'd call this a hyper UnReal render. Wow. I'm assuming that this is hi-res jessie with the hires map, or is it an expansion (non-p6 included) texture?

Excellent. Have you seen the post at the RDNA P6 forum about an IBL template? (It's currently on the 1st page of posts). It lays out the structure of an IBL setup and shows which areas affect the render. It might be useful to you for more experiments. mac

Looks very nice. You did a good job on the shoulder morphs for Jessi. At least it looks like you 'smoothed' them down.

Negative intensity spots!!?? First I've heard of that. The mind boggels with the potential.

Yes this is the hi-res Jessi using the hi-res map as the basis of a simple skin shader using my own specularity map and blended fastscatter (on the alternate diffuse node) I'm slowly beginning to get to grips with the lighting set up, though getting correct AO settings for every situation is a bit of a mystery still. Yes I have seen the IBL template post and shall shortly be using it to create some of my own lightprobes (this used one of the included defaults) Once people start to get the hang of this, the output should be stunning :-)

'Negative intensity spots!!?? First I've heard of that. The mind boggels with the potential' nance, It's something that daz studio has had for a while, and it's incredibly useful. Instead of messing around trying to block light and create shadows, just set up a light to neg intensity and use it instead. mac

Thanks Mac, Read most of the lighting related posts, here, but that tidbit in DAZ Studio had gone right past me. Although, short of a black hole, complete nonsense IRL, now that it is described, makes perfect, forehead-slapping, sense in a 3D graphics universe. DOOH! (Gotta start hanging around in a different class of skanky waterfront graphics bars I suppose.)

Well, as a matter of fact, it was in DS, then taken out, then added back in again. The topic came up in a thread at DAZ yesterday. That's when I found out it was back in again. It's sort of undocumented at the moment. As questor pointed out, people don't trumpet features that suck up all the nice lighting they provide. LOL. But it works.... and then some! I love it. mac