How to improve specular rendering?

RexRed

How to improve specular rendering?

In many casesa I prefer the results of specular rendering. The skin tones seem more natural to me.

It does take longer to render.

I often see more fireflies and there are "areas of noise" with specular rendering.

I am wondeing if there is a way to improve this noise issue?

I recall there was a raytracing light path setting somewher to tell Daz to computer the light path longer?

It seems like the light path is reaching some kind of barrier and when it reaches that barrier it stops computing the rays...

Is there a light path setting and where is that located? Any info on that setting would be very useful.

Thank you.

RexRed

I just found it, setting "max light path".

What exactly does this setting do, what does it mainly effect and when does it give you a better render?

I am not looking to speed things up, I am looking to get the clearest and most detailed render from my lighting and realistic color.

Fishtales

The Max Path Length is the number of bounces a light will take before it diminishes. Think of two mirrors facing each other with a figure between. With MPL of 10 there will be ten receding images in the mirror. With 100  there would be a possible 100.. There is also the shinier the surface the more bounces it will take to reduce the noise. I keep my MPL at 10 and reduce the Glossiness and/or the strength of light (lumen) and use Tone Mapping to lighten or darken the image. It is a balancing act to get it all to work together. The other thing I do is to reduce or increase the Nominal Luminance under Filtering, I keep mine at 1500, which can decrease the fireflies. I increase it or decrease it depending on the strength and or the colour of the light. I can't give you any kind of formula as it is always different for each case.

RexRed

Hello Fishtales, that is very awesome info, thanks for sharing! 

RexRed

I am finding the single most greatest factor to getting pristine and clear renders is to render and 10,000 or greater pixels and then to resize it down to 4k for publishing.