I hope that you can make out the line. It's running across the bridge of the nose: it's most obvious underneath the left-hand (your perspective) eye. It's an ABO+IBL render, with raytracing and texture filtering turned on. Can anyone advise me on how to get rid of this line?

First try increasing the AO bias, and disable texture filtering. Texture filtering is a resource hog, and I really don't see anything in this render that would require it. Perhaps also try changing Post filter type to gaussian, with filter size of 2, and reduce min shading rate to around 0.4 or less. A screencap of your current render settings might help as well.

Is that rogue trooper?

@xantor: it certainly is! Do you think I got the skin tone and eyes right? cheers maxxxmodelz, that stuff worked a treat :b

Yes, the skin tone and the eyes look right. it is very good.

With this image (still an IBL render), there are no lines - but blotches. I believe that this is caused by the Ambient Occlusion wacro in the material room; since the figure on the left (with ambient occlusion) has the blotches, whilst the figure on the right (with no AO material room adjustment) has no blotches.

here are my render settings

I should also point out that these blotches happen with shadows on and off

Hi. Yes, that's caused by the ambient occlusion. The reason they still appear with shadows turned off is because the occlusion itself is not controlled by shadows, but raytracing. The solution here is to increase the min bias for the occlusion node you used on the material. It may only need to be increased a little, or a lot... you'll have to experiment with that. Increasing the bias to just the right amount should make this go away. Also, use "smooth polygons" in your render settings, which will also help this a bit by smoothing out some of the harsh angles that may be present in the mesh.

Oh, and also you can lower your pixel samples to 4 or 5 instead of 6 (which is probably a bit high for this scene). Your max texture size might be somewhat high as well. This has nothing to do with the occlusion problem though.

Message edited on: 08/23/2005 11:18

The max texture size is a bit high for scenes like this, they don`t really need textures that big.

It looks the wrong shape of blotch to be anything to do with the Min Displacement Bounds setting, but if you're using Displacement Maps a too-low setting can lead to more angular blotching. That can also be adjusted for the figure or body-part, as well as the scene as a whole. (And displacement maps are one way of getting a visible step at the boundary between cloth and skin.)