ChromeStar posted at 9:09PM Tue, 22 December 2020 - #4408148

@ghostship2 There are four point lights down in the pit, plus a sheet of lava which is an emissive surface (physicalsurface root node, emission strength set to 1 with a fairly bright image map attached). The eyes are emissive surfaces too. Then a pair of point lights out past the doorway (i.e. not in this room), you can see one through the portcullis and the other is behind the camera.

Diffuse bounces was only set to 1. Since you asked about it, I tried a render with it raised to 4. As you might expect, that fills in the shadows quite a bit. Light bounces around more, and gets to more of those places. In this case I like it better with the lower value. The higher value did reduce the graininess, probably just because there is more light.

I'd set diffuse bounces to 6, make sure the point lights were on inverse square and then adjust the exposure down (post FX) after render to your liking. As is it looks like a video game render. No trying to offend just here to help!

W10, Ryzen 5 1600x, 16Gb,RTX2060Super+GTX980, PP11, 11.3.740