sorry to interrupt, but I don't understand what you're doing. Things that popped up my mind when reading:
- skull caps are meant to remain invisible
- filter: sinc is sharper than gaussian (see the manual)
- filter: 1 means NO filter, 2 means soft (female skin), 3 means crisp (hair and male skin) and 4 is too much for about everything
- min shading rate .2 means at most 1/.2=5 subpolys per render pixel. It mainly affects displacement sharpness and texturemap subsampling. Lower is sharper. The value should stay in sync with Pixel Samples.
- IDL splotches are the result of a too small amount of rays at a too high intensity. Irr cache rebalances these at the cost of render time. Use 80 for final, 40 for draft. IDL Quality supports that without the rendertime penalty. Keep that at 80 or so.
- Increasing the size of the IDL light sources in the scene (and reducing their strength) might be an option as well. Usually, having lightsources with Ambient > 2 is an indicator for blotches coming up.
- the working of Direct-Light Blur Radius depends on the kind of shadow (raytraced / mapped) and the kind of light (infinite or point/spot). Your 8.5 sounds low for spotlight, to me.
For raytraced shadows, it's adviced to keep the blur-radius : shadow sample ratio on 1 : 10, so your 8.5 requires a 80-100 samples value.
Perhaps this is a bit of help, questions welcome. Poser lighting and rendering is a horror story, but not a bad one... Please give us your lighting rig to help you with specific issues.
And yes... your last result looks pretty cool indeed. Compliments.
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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.
visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though
