You might not find this as exciting as I do, with all those amazing new features of Blender. But with this one I will finally get rid of some unpleasant effects, like light coming out of the nostrils of my characters. I know I could tweak the bias setting, but I never got it right, now results are better with almost no tweaking.
The model in these three images has lots of erros (ugly fingers and hair), but what I want to show is the compared results from 2.42 and 2.43.
Rendering in Blender 2.42. Her teeth and left eye are too bright. There is light inside the mouth.
I used to turn on “both” (add and sub) in ambient occlusion to darken those areas, but the result was not always nice, because it depends on the size of the object and ugly black areas can be the result, besides from noise:
Spot lamps in Blender 2.43. Same model. Renders so much nicer right from the first attempt without any tweaks. No noticeable rendering time increase. No need to use “sub”.
For older projects just change spot lights from “Classical” to “Classic-Halfway”. Classic-Halfway is the new default since results are so much better.
It is up to you to use ambient occlussion or ray tracing. What I meant is that I am happy to not have to use “sub” anymore (implicit in “both”) in AO to darken concave areas.
I have not used autoclip very much to tell any difference with manually setting clip limits, but results are very good so far.
I am still confused about layered rendering, but will look into it, thanks.
