Hi Martin,
You are right. It probably isn’t the number of bounces, but another thing that I did. So I tried to have an HDRI have an effect on only the armour. So that it wouldn’t look black, or at least not to black because there wasn’t anything reflecting it. Even with light linking, it felt to me to uniformly black. So I searched for a different solution, so in my world settings I toggled everything on for Ray Visibility except for the diffuse. So the shiny armour would be affected, but the rest of the scene only limitedly. I’m not sure why that would mess up the SSS.
I will need to do some further render test to see if this is really the cause of it all.
