She's pratically rudolph.

 

Does anyone know a good fix for this?  I used VSS on the skin (a max scatter shader) and this is what happened.  One possibly important note: viki is scaled up to 1200% in this image (for reasons) but that's not apparent in this image.

AO node attached to the nostril material was used to control that I think. I don't seem to experience it anymore rendering with IDL.

Are you by any chance using shadow mapped lights and not raytraced lights? That's the only thng I can think of that might bring this back. Since I started using IDL I've never seen a glowing nostril :)

Shadow bias too high if you're using shadow mapped lights.

May be the same even with raytraced lights.

If you're using IBL without IDL, you need AO. IBL + IDL or IBL + AO - take your pick.

I don't think it's the nostil mat.  I've tried making it completely black with no specular and I still get that.  I had IDL on (3 bounces) so I'll look into my IBL settings.  I did have one infinite light (for the sun) though.  Also shadows were ray traced and I tried setting them very low.  For this one it is .0001 on the shadow min bias.

It looks like what is happening is the front of the nose isn't blocking light from hitting the back. 

Here the shadow min bias is set to .000001.  And if you look closely, you'll notice that V4's mesh is starting to show through the texture.

Crap. 

BTW, I've been trying to play with the intensity of the IBL a little, that's why the overall lightness is going up and down.

Seems like I recall something similar when I had shadows turned off on some of the lights, except the problem turned up on the underarms. You might look at something along those lines.

I know I end up with shadows turned on for all lights (except IBL), but sometimes they're turned down to .1 or .2

Okay, I'm almost certain that it isn't ambient related because if I change the position of the light, the problem goes away.  However, I thought that shadow min bias was supposed to cover that.

 

If I didn't mention nostril glow and if we were to assume that such a thing was not the case, can anyone give me an idea about what's going on here?

Here, I swinged the light around so it's on the left side of viki.  Only the area on the opposite nostril that it's reflecting off of is bright.

tee hee, if you point a flashlight at your nostrils it will light up    

yep, just tested.  :scared:  there be hairs up there.  part of the in-house filtering system, prolly

on the old cp forums, vaguely remember suggestions on nose plugs.

If you look at how the shadows are falling (the light is above your nostils) then there shouldn't be all that specular in the dark area.  Could there be some brightness?  Yes but my scene really isn't set up for reflecting that much ambient back up.

I'm really stuck on what to do with the shadows and the fact too much light is passing through vicky where it shouldn't.  I've tried the minimum bias I could do, zero, and the problem was still there.

I've been able to conquer nostril glow in a few cases by morphing the nostrils to make them deeper.  This has helped in cases where one or more lights had shadow casting deactivated, and I was happy to have avoided tinkering with shadow bias settings.  :lol:  This is probably a YMMV type suggestion, though.

Okay, I'm 100% sure it is not nostril glow.  I'm calling it nostril specular fubar.

It seems to be happening due to a combonation of 3 things: the image map (I'm thinking it's the tone and color of the skin), the amount of specular reflection, and the angle of the light.  Whenever I disable the specular component, the problem goes away.

I'm thinking the best option for this problem would be a blender map which turns off specular for that area when it pops up.

Quote -  I've tried making it completely black with no specular and I still get that.

Quote - Whenever I disable the specular component, the problem goes away.

Total contradiction here - I don't understand what you're saying.

The part that's reflecting isn't the nostril material, which is the one in the first quote.  That's the one I tried to completely disable and it had no effect.  In the second quote, since I can't make it completely black, I disabled the specular on the skinface material or whatever it's called.

Sorry for not being clear.