Hi,
I have still problems with color banding in some projects. Unfortunately I haven´t found any solution on the web. I tried many lightmass settings and I changed values in the baselightmass.ini to get more photons in my scene.
This eliminates the banding in some way but is producing new artefacts (dark spots etc.) and the render time increases dramatically!
In my exmple I have a very simple scene…(a small room) But I get always a bad lighting result also with the production setting.
This is really very annoying. I am using only one skylight (intensity 5) and a directional light (intensity 3)
With these setting right now you have just 1 bounce of skylight and have a directional light which bounces “randomly”.
with the high smoothness setting you wash away your details…
I wouldn’t go higher than 10 in the bounces and would set the skyligh bounce to the same setting!
Smoothness I would go with 0.6 to get better shadow details. I wouldn’t use ambient occlusion until you’re happy with your clean lighting…
I wouldn’t change anything in baselightmass.ini…
Are you using any color grading or heavy post processing? Usually that’s when I get those (contrast)