Varnayrah posted at 2:18PM Sat, 02 February 2019 - #4345042

Hmmm... I have a little problem, perhaps someone can help me: I have to use unusual high render settings to get rid of grain for LaFemme. But I'm not sure if it's due to the shader set (SSS with refracted eyes), the light (from blackheart's Superfly Studio) or something else.... but usually I have the following render settings: Pixel Samples 14 with branched Path tracing and diffuse samples 5, glossy samples 3, transmission, sub surface, volume and ao samples 2, Mesh light samples 15. That has been more than sufficient in most cases so far but not now. I've been going up to 24 pixel samples and more and still have slight grain on some skin areas (especially in the shadow). Seeing as this is a SSS skin shader would it perhaps be wiser to increase the subsurface samples instead of the whole pixel samples thing? Or anything else? I'm not using progressive refinement because that doesn't work well with branched path tracing and without it I have slightly different colours. Indeed I have seen many LaFemme images, even in promos, with grain so I thought perhaps her shader settings require different treating?

I don't render with CPU, ever, but I just tried a render with these settings and it came out glass smooth. I probably could have went down to 16-18 samples.

Keep in mind that the eyes with refraction needed to be Area-Rendered with transmission bumped up.

Some of your bounces - like diffuse - are way too high. The only time I've noticed needing more than 2 diffuse bounces was when I was specifically testing it in a small test scene with Red/Blue spheres right beside each other in a tiny room bouncing colored light all over the place, but this scenario is unlikely to happen in the typical Poser gallery render.

If you have the option to render with GPU you really should be taking advantage of that. I can't see any 'color' difference between the two - perhaps you had different settings set and that was influencing your result. My results were identical, but with GPU rendering being about 2-3x faster.