Gee, a few messages to catch up on! Baggins, your issue in post #36 is exactly the reason I think that material based AO is better than light based AO. However, material AO only has an effective distance of around 20 inches - so it's not so good for getting general shadows in the room. And it also does interesting things to the corners of walls. But it is awesome for foot-to-floor interfaces, and skin-to-clothing, etc. I suspect that light based AO was added to provide a shadowing system for IBL images, rather than provide a /better/ shadowing system than r/trace or depth mapped. So IMO, you are better off just using the IBL as a filler, and getting all your shadows from normal lights (ray-traced or depth mapped). Use normal lights for the majority of the light sources in the scene. Which is the whole basis of the tutorial I posted. Derive your lights from the IBL image (using HDRShop), use those lights for shadowing, and use the original IBL image as a filler. Using the tutorial, it takes 5 mins to set everything up. The biggest time killer is calculating the depth mapped shadows. The higher the quality, the longer the rendertime. OK, back to your system. The post in msg #39. Is the IBL image actually adding anything in this scene? Maybe a comparison render with just the lights so we can see the difference? Also, IMO the shadows are still a little way off. Check her right-hand-on-knee, and left-hand-on-hip - the shadows on both seem odd. The above render shows the shadows you can get with material based AO plus depth mapped shadows. There was no IBL filler in this scene - so it's got an "interior" feel to it. You can see I haven't placed her left foot correctly - however, the interface between her and the floor is pretty good - and all the lighting and shadowing was very easy to setup.

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