Bopper - shadows like I showed above are exactly what you get on a stage or any large room with a single light source near the subjects. They are perfectly realistic for the environment I created, and if I made a similar one in real life, then it would really look like that. There is only a wall and floor in my setup, so even though IDL is enabled, there's nothing else around to bounce light off of. But there is still a lot of bounced light.

I chose that scenario, only because it would demonstrate the banding problem and the zero-data problem.

But much can be learned from studying that setup.

Here is the same, rendered with GC, but without IDL. Lacking the IDL, this is indeed very unrealistic. Compare this with my second render above.

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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)