Shadows gone hard

aaráribel caađo

I'm having a problem with hard shadows and wondered if anyone else has encountered this and how they fixed it. I fear this is a problem deep within my skin shader, but without a Nvidia card for quick test renders, fixing this by trial and error is a daunting proposition, so I'm hoping somebody else has some ideas to guide my expiraments. Somebody suggested it might be a normal map problem, but rendering without a normal map didn't change anything, so I think that's out. 

The color image is the toned render. The hard shadows are there in the raw output as well. The other image has a no texture maps, no translucency/SSS, basic "clay' textue. The scene is lit with a 25EV HDRI from HDRIHeaven. None of the other scene elements have shadow problems. I have encountered this problem at least three times before, each time in scenes lit with HDRIs without other lights. 

Any suggestions?

dijitul

What type of light are you using?  If it's a spotlight, is it set to point? rectangle? round?  If it's an emissive, which shader is it using and how big is the object and/or light map?  Since you said no Nvidia, this assumes no iray?  So you're using 3Dlight?  

aaráribel caađo

I solved this! I am using Iray, which you can use without a Nvidia card, but you have to be patient. I usually render overight.

I thought the problem was going to be SSS or translucency related, but it turns out it was my bump map settings, which were pumped up to 4.0. I'm not sure why I went with that value, but I did, and turning it down to 1.0 gives me smooth shadows. The aforementioned slow render times mean I haven't been able to see how much impact this has on skin detail when rendering close ups.