Ghostofmacbeth: Oh wow, aren't you the creator of the war orc model? Yeah that might explain it then. My min shading rate is at .1 when i render at the highest quality. Would you recommend i just scrap the specular map and try using highlights without it? 

Very nice model btw =) The reason i'm persistent on figuring out this problem is because the war orc model imo is probably one of the best orc models out there period. It's just the specularity with gamma correction on that's giving me the problems.

 

To all those about the IBL vs IDL: Dunno, i like the results of indirect lighting a lot, but diffuse IBL's work very well too. I still use simple spotlights/infinite lights with no raytracing, and with proper postwork in photoshop it still can look just as good if done properly. The best results i seen was combining IDL with IBL/spotlights/infinites/points. It's more of a preference and dependent on what you want to do.

 

bagginsbill: Yeah, i'm practicing lighting right now and trying out different lighting techniques. I notice that IDL brightens up a scene more in comparison to just using IBL. The drawback i've encountered, is that some areas with IDL were darker unless you turn up the bounces to catch those closed areas (like under a table or body), which leads to a huge increase in render time. However IBL with an HDR file does this with significantly lower render time but with similar results. So far i pretty much like all lighting techniques (probably because the majority of my work is in photoshop). On that realistic render in your second image on the 2nd page, what's your lighting setup? It says you have IDL enabled, but what about other lights and are you using a dome for that or no since it's inside the house?

 

Primorge: It depends on what you're doing and what kind of comp you're running. I generally do this as a hobby, so most of my images are in the 900-1200 resolution range. I'm running on 32-bit xp with a 3.2 ghz tri-core with 4 gigs of ram (rendering in a separate process to get more use on a 32-bit system) and generally indirect lighting renders very fast. If you use the script though for advanced settings and increase them a lot, you'll have very large render times though.