i ran across this problem quite a few times already and finally managed to do a generic recreation to nail it down.
I get severly visible Edges with Lights coming from flat angles on a surface with bump.
In the example it’s a simple Polyshape with a default VRayMaterial that has a Specklemap added as bump.
The Cylinder has a basic gray VRayMaterial with some glossy reflection.
My first thought was to tweak the light bias. But even tho that helps (edges are still visible even tho a lot less) it introduces HEAVY banding artifacts. (See image 2)
This is somewhat normal; bump mapping is not continuous across triangles.
The only way to reduce these artifacts is to refine the geometry, or to reduce the bump.
Note that this is not specific to V-Ray; you will get the same results with other renderers in 3ds Max also. You can notice this effect very well if you apply a Gradient map as a bump map on a sphere, for example.
I noticed that too. Sorry forgot to mention in the first post. The Problem is that with the original meshes we usually cannot shell them. They originate from CAD data and contain Vertex-Normals that are destroyed/get lost when the mesh is edited
