You have to LOWER the bias, not raise it. If you raise it the loss of shadow will get bigger.

And you're right, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place, out of the frying pan into the fire.

If bias is too low, you get horrible artifacts - black splotches.

If bias is too high, you are missing some shadow in the small areas.

With light-based AO, quite often it is too low and too high AT THE SAME TIME. In other words, no value will give correct results.

That is why I almost NEVER use light-based AO. That is why I have put AO into the VSS shaders for you. Material-based AO is different. It uses different algorithms. It works better. And when it still doesn't work good enough, you have more than one place to adjust. You can make it lower on the legs, but higher on the chest. This increases the number of acceptable solutions for your scene.

With light-based AO, the number of times it needs adjustment one way in one place and the other way in another place is very high. But you only have one knob - you cannot simultaneously raise it here and lower it there.

I fought this for a long time. Face_off told me over and over - do not use light-based AO. Use only material based AO. It is implemented better, and you have more control. I did not listen to him. I kept struggling with render settings, AO settings, camera angles, lighting tricks, blah blah blah. I did this for a year. I struggled with it through a thousand renders. I fought it because  (here is where you should laugh) I wanted to save time. I did not want to spend the effort to adjust AO settings on each and every material. However, by trying to find a way to use light-based AO, I ended up spending 100 times more of my time! I wasted my time.

Do not waste your time.

Also, I have made it easier to deal with the material AO now. We have VSS. You can connect it and tweak it in one place, and VSS will copy the node for you over and over. It's as easy as having light-based AO.

In addition, face_off made Occlusion Master so you can review and adjust all your AO nodes in one place. I have this too, in VSS. I simply have not given you this functionality in the free version. Heheheh.

 

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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)