Quote - First time I'm saying this. Been meaning to write a whole tutorial on it but I have no time. I'm leaving for the airport again in 5 minutes.

Here goes:

Diffuse reflectivity in Poser is out of whack. Our light sources are meaningless units - 100% of what? But we need to get a handle on this. We all know Diffuse_Value is not supposed to be 1 (i.e. it's impossible to reflect all the light that arrives). So we've learned to drop it to .85. But that isn't realistic either. In real life it's closer to .1 or .15.

But - if we start using Diffuse_Value = .1 instead of .8, we're going to have to set our lights 800% brighter just to get the same reflection. 800% is still meaningless, but what happens is it balances with the diffuse indirect light.

So - we have a problem. Indirect light is unbalanced with direct light. We notice this because we see glowing armpits, right? It's been in the forum over and over for weeks. Complaints that IDL causes armpit glow. It's not IDL fault. It's that you have Diffuse_Value set to .85, which is about 8 times more reflective than reality.

So - we could go back through every material and drop the Diffuse_Value again and also go through all the lights and raise them 8x brighter. Or...

(and here's why I'm writing)

Set the IDL intensity to something in the range .1 to .15. Try your renders again. Tell me what you see?

In all my renders, the occluded areas are suddenly looking right.

Gotta go.

Do you still approve of using your light meter in IDL + SSS scenes given the current dilemmas? So far they've still been working great, just curious on your feedback.