Quote - Thanks, everyone.  :laugh:

I'm taking notes, here.

• Lighting is too strong for GC

This could be the case, since GC normally makes everything brighter. But since there are no clipped (white) pixels in your image, it should not be harmful. Note that the light you have in your virtual studio seems to be essentially yellow. And because Batgirl's suit is essentially violet, which is complementary to yellow, the yellow light from the environment (generated from IDL) cannot properly bring out the violet suit, so it appears somewhat muddy greyish (as it would in reality).

Quote - - Optimal GC requires a closed environment; use BB's envirosphere-thingy

Yes and No. GC does not need a closed environment. The closed environment is good for adding realism by using indirect lighting. And when striving for realism, you normally use gamma correction, too. But GC and realsm are essentially two different concepts.

Quote - - GC should be 2.2 for EITHER materials OR render options, but not both; one or the other should be at 1.0

By materials, you mean the image maps? These two are unrelated. You would use GC=2.2 in your render settings based on what you want to do with the image, after your rendered it. For the images (textures) it depends on what kind of data your image maps contain. If the source of the image maps are photos, they normally contain gamma encoded values, so you use Gamma=2.2, too.

Quote - - Grey maps (bump, trans, etc) should be at GC 1.0

Yes, but it is "should", not "must". Again this is affected by the actual data contained in your greymaps. That means in particular, you have to actually know what data those greymaps contain, which is often not immediately clear. For example, if you constructed those maps with photoshop by filling them with pixel value 128, thinking "Hey, those pixels should let half of the light through!", you use gamma=1. If you constructed them in photoshop thinking "Hm, this color looks like it let half of the light through", then you use gamma=2.2. If you got your greymaps from some dubious internet sources, you have to look at them and take a guess.

When using maps for multiple purposes at once, i would normally use a gamma-node, and not the value in the image-node. Especially since the image-node's gamma is a global value shared among all materials, which usually leads to annoyance.

Quote - To answer some questions (or try to :lol:).

• The Batgirl character is available on my Antonia site, but the one pictured above is halfway updated for P9/PPro2012.  A fully updated version will be posted some time after Antonia-WM is available.
• I've always had a tendency to overlight scenes, I think, and my lights are definitely not optimized for GC (or realism/verism in general, I suspect).  I'll try to apply the suggestions given above (thank you!).
• I have IDL, IBL, and AO enabled, above.  I guess they aren't all needed, with GC?

Usually you can skip the AO, because when you buy IDL, it is inclusive.

Quote - - The suit and hair shaders are definitely not optimized for GC, and that leads into one of my main problems, about which I'll expound below.  :laugh:

The attached shows the hair shader.  As shown, the greyscale bump/displacement map also functions as the color map for the hair, after being run through various color nodes.  I have no idea how to replicate a similar effect for GC compatibility.  BB's satin shader may show the way, with its built-in node-driven GC, but I can't sort out what he's doing, to try to adapt the process for my needs.