Krippahl and Dwight, thanks so much! That material smoothness slider is magic! I can't believe how easily it works! And it doesn't even seem to slow render speed down too heavily.
What does the merge vertices function actually do? It doesn't seem to make a difference whether I do it or not, and it gives one of those scary warnings that it can't be undone..
P.S. Dwight I might actually do that. I seem to have hit a bit of a ceiling in improving my renders with Artlantis. They're looking pretty good I'd say, but they're missing a lot of what makes a truly professional looking image, and the Artlantis forum's not really much help once you've grasped the basics of the software..
Cape Town, South Africa
AC 24
Windows 10
Intel Core i3-4160 3.6GHz
NVidia GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER