Very nice portrait render. Classic setup. I suggest reducing the body bump settings; her skin is exhibiting an orange skin effect and appears too exaggerated. Also, soften the image's appearance with a slight blur. Portraits benefit from soft features which hide skin imperfections and harsh wrinkles.

Very interesting comments! Makes me wonder if you have experience in a real life photography studio. You seem to think and sound like a portrait photographer.

Any suggestions on how to reduce the body bumps and the orange skin effect? Probably something in the Materials Room, and I could experiment, but my energy level is still too low for much experimentation.

I shall try adding a slight blur. Haven't liked the result in the past, but since you suggest it, I'll have another go. And, yeah, in the studio I would have almost automatically added a softener to my lens for a woman's portrait.

Btw, I did manage enough energy to play with making my target ball disappear for the renders. Ultimately it required turning off Visible in Raytrace, Visible in Camera, and Casts shadows.

Orangeness might be temperature of main light. I shall try to experiment with that too.

On the skin material shader, look for bump settings and note the assigned values. They might be a bit too high, try playing with the values and perform quick renders to gauge the skin's appearance. Softening the image should take care of that problem but it might take critical tweaking to get it just right. I think your lights are fine, I wouldn't change them unless you want to experiment with different color temperatures. Take care.

Thank you for the suggestions!

I changed temperature of the main light to 10000. Much nicer.

I will probably post a version two, after I find the energy to tweak things a bit...

No bump map. But it turns out that a node called Normal Map, which has only a color value and is plugged into NormalMap for the torso material, oddly enough seems to control the roughness. No idea why, but dialing NormalMap value down from 1 to .5 is pretty much what was wanted.

Frustrated. It has no bump map. I tried playing around with roughness but that seemed to just totally screw things up.

Normal maps are the substitute for bump maps; they work better because they take into account light orientation due to their coloration. Those are tricky to work with, but not impossible. I don't know what your Material Room shaders look like, so I can't make any suggestions on how to tweak your settings. That is something that can be conveyed either through site mail or the forum, where I try to help others with issues.

Thank you, hborre! It was, all-in-all, not a complicated Material Room setup, so I just said to myself, "Self, something in there is causing the bumpiness". And, as you saw in Take 2, without understanding why, I figured out to tweak NormalMap!!

Thank you again for all your help. You are, btw, the only person giving me critiques. 😊 And I find them to be very, very, useful.

You're welcome. Any time.