Hoping for a little shadow problem direction

spearcarrier

Hi guys! After 2 days my computer just finished the attached render. And I'm not sure where I went wrong with two things:

The shading rate
The handles showing around the angels' knees.

First, the shading rate. I'm using UberEnvironment, ambiance only, with occlusion samples set at about 240. (Usually that works.) I don't want this picture to have a lot of light, so I put it's intensity down to 20% and the color a light denim blue.
When that didn't work I went Under render settings I also upped the shading rate to 32. (Which I'm given to understand is the max before it doesn't matter anymore.)
I'm not sure what else I can do in regards to the mottled look of the image.

Handles: WHyyyyYyyYyyYyYyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy........
They don't show up in my work window at all.
They're set to 0% opacity in the shader settings.
But at least they're shiny.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I don't know if I'll be rerendering this because of how long it took and I need this puter for work, so I'm glad and lucky that I have post work plans for this image that make the problems moot. But... still... I'd like to know what I did.

Thanks in advance!

Richard Haseltine

If uber Environment is set to Ambient only then it's just providing non-directional light, so most of the settings have no effect - I suspect your noise is coming from somewhere else (check your base render settings and make sure you don't have a second UE). If the handles have multiply specular through opacity off that might be your problem - if you haven't autofitted the outfit it's better to turn visibility off.