Thanks Jay. I have not spent a lot of time in mental ray. I generally just turn on FG and crank the quality to production fine trace, fiddle a bit with the env color and toss in a sight wall.

I have been wanting to replace FG with AO for a while now but each time I look at the MR docs my head starts to hurt. No one I work with uses entertainment modeling sw so I have to figure it out on my own along with help for good folks like you.

It is starting to make some sense to me though. The one thing that drives me bonkers with MR is the seeming randomness of everything. How are you supposed to figure out how to set things if there are no rules pr guideline or work flows? That is why a set out to systematically see what the distance value and spread really do and if you can use scene measurements to get you to the right numbers faster rather then just pulling them out your ass so to speak. And this is just one of many variables that all affect each other! It's like trying to solve a multi-variable equation with dozens of inputs! Where do you start? What order do you set things?

I mean what is the point of getting a render to 10 secs if you take 600 hours to figure out the settings and then the next render is completely different and you have to start all over again!

I am now going to scale the model from the current real world size and try the renders again with the distance set to the same proportional distance and see if I get a similar render with the model scaled larger and smaller.

Also I have a ao shader, a wf shader, and then procedurals (blinns, mostly) for the painted renders and what I am calling the diffuse render looks milky because of the all white background but if I tried adjust the levels the whole thing gets darker and so then when I composite the AO layer it gets very dark.

Anyway can you dig that crazy ass part! I counted it and there are like 15 shapes all crammed into a single unified mesh! I thing the topology looks pretty good. I did end up with 3 triangles.