Quote - a small mistake is maybe to much AO around the ears. maybe we should lower it to 2 or 1.5.

I agree, but it's tough to fix. The problem is that material based AO makes no distinction between occlusion of your ambient (IBL) light, versus occlusion of your directional lights. The result is that directional light is "occluded" as well, which is wrong, because we already have directional shadows to take care of this phenomenon.

We really should be using AO on the IBL light only, and not using it at all in materials. Unfortunately, Poser's light-based AO is seriously buggy. I never wanted to use material-based AO at all for this. But I did hundreds of experiments with light-based AO, and there are too many situations where Poser just doesn't do it right. Face_off told me at least a dozen times to stop using light-based AO and only do material based AO. I finally listened to him - and this is what we get.

Decreasing the AO strength is something you can do in the shader itself. It would have to be in proportion to how much light is from IBL, which I don't know up front. Remember, though, that the AO node strength parameter doesn't do anything. (Another Poser bug). So we have to use a Blender to actually control the strength.

You could also use an AO control mask if you want to make one. You'd use that to drive the blender, so the AO strength is variable across the surface.

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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)