Hi all. I'm "on the road" and can't do Poser demo renders or material screen shots. So you'll have to settle for words today. Which means this is going to get wordy.

JB: I saw a post on CP about this yesterday, and speculation that I could help. Was that you? Yesterday I was working on a tutorial about this, because I saw the question over there. If that was you, let me know so I don't bother answering in both places.

So my first thought, same as replicand, was the Gather node.

Gather is like a blurry reflection, but limited by distance. It is similar in behavior to the Ambient_Occlusion node. What both do is shoot out some semi-random rays in a cone, starting from the point being rendered. When these rays hit nothing, they do nothing. When the rays hit something, the nodes perform a calculation, based on how far the ray travelled and the angle of the ray with respect to the normal of the surface.

The AO node assembles all the hits and returns a gray-scale darkened value in proportion to the number of hits and how close they were. The Gather node does a little more. It calls the shader for each hit point, gets a reflected color, and blends them together.

So - we should be able to use a Gather node. However, when I tested it, it generated all kinds of ugly artifacts. So I postponed my tutorial - until I figure out how to get it to stop doing weird things.

But in a nutshell: Connect a Gather to Alternate_Diffuse. Set the Alt_Diffuse color to a dark to mid gray, so as to prevent the effect from being 100% which would be too much.

Use at least 30 Samples.

Experiment with the Gather distance - and pay attention to your display units. In my system Inches, I was working with Gather distance of 300. 300 what, I don't know. I think its tenths of an inch.

If you get artifacts, too, try adjusting the RayBias upwards. Watch out - too much and you get "detachment", wherein things that are really close have no influence any more. This is bad, since it is the opposite of the intention.

On thing that might help you debug: Turn off Diffuse_Value and Specular_Value (set them to 0), temporarily. Then  when you render, you'll ONLY be seeing the results from the Gather. You should see a red glow near the sweater.

Then turn the DV and SV back on. Render again. This is when I saw artifacts - strange bright spots that did not belong, and did not actually make sense, since the Gather alone looked fine.

---

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)