I also appreciate the back-and-forth with you @naiad! I think I’m understanding better where you’re coming from. Clearly you’re willing to boldy experiment and figure out things. Maybe even more than me:
By experimenting the AO on the “Project Naiad”, I had wasted 3 months, which may not be a long time to some people
That’s waaay too long to be stuck on AO, especially when the problem is likely material or render setting and not resculpting. But like you said, how does one know that…I will say that usually you want a hair emitter mesh unchecked at render time. That being enabled is probably causing the unwanted AO. I go over this in the hair chapter.
Try another render with the hair emitter disabled at render time to see if that solves the darkened scalp border.
There’s no way “mesh from curve/meta/surf/text” is causing your issues, even though I said I only know what it does with “90% certainty” 😅
