Where's my bat?

Nostril glow is entirely because you didn't set up shadows correctly on your lights. I wrote a detailed tutorial about this 3 years ago.

Proper and realistic depth-mapped shadows require a larger shadow map size than the default 256. Further, the depth-map should be concentrated on the areas we see in the scene, particularly in a face portrait. Also, ray-bias settings, when too high, can cause the geometry of the nostril to be ignored.

For directional lights, if you use ray-traced shadows, with a correct value for bias, you will not have nostril glow.

When using IBL, if you use AO as well (material-based or light-based), you will not have nostril glow AND the reset of your figure will actually look real as opposed to the crap flooding the gallery.

If you use depth-mapped shadows and you increase your shadow map size and focus your shadow cams on the face you will not have nostril glow.

Those are the correct ways to combat nostril glow.

I'll admit that tuning AO requires some learning and practice but you don't need to learn these things. My free VSS shaders have very sophisticated AO settings built into them already. Just use them, its a few clicks nothing more.

There is only one other legit technique for nostril glow. Burn the darkened area into your color map to begin with, or better yet, layer a mask on top of the face shader that has two little texture map "plugs" that darken whatever texture is being used. I wrote about that technique as well and I provided a free gray-scale mask for V3 that took care of it for that figure. I can provide a similar mask for Antonia.

The reason I oppose the nostril material zone is the same reason I oppose a lip zone. Material zone boundaries do not have a smooth transition. If you put a different shader on a nostril zone, the darker skin forms a hard-edged line where the nostril joins the upper lip and that just looks wrong. And the amount of darkening is usually wrong except for specific and rare lighting situations, so all in all its just a bad idea.

Have a look at this render I did:

The nostrils are not glowing, but they're not uniformly darker either. This appearance here is correct, given the angles of the lights I'm using. And obviously I did it without the use of a separate material zone.

 

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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)