OK, had a look to see if I could replicate the problem - which I did.  The 'banding' gets worse as you widen the angle of the spotlight... up to 90deg it's hard to see, but once you're at 150deg it's quite clear.  The angle at which the light is hitting the objects also affects the severity of the banding - the white plane (no texture, bumps or AO involved) in my test had a light hitting it at 45deg.  The banding gets narrower as you reduce the angle... just like 'widening' the spotlight beyond 90deg.  It's clearly a side effect of the 'soft shadow' process.  The size of the shadow map also contributes heavily, as expected.  So 4K shadow maps yielding the best result and 512 looking like you're shooting through venetian blinds.  What's really weird is the actual 'shadows' don't have the bands... go figure!?!

Oh boy! 3 pages already
Yes, it is not the texture in any way.
Suppose nobody checked the second reply in this thread, where I posted the link the very same problem I had 6 month ago.
Yes, it caused by the shadow and it varies with falloff angle, changing stripes pattern.

" ..... What's really weird is the actual 'shadows' don't have the bands...... "
Yeah Mark - I noticed that too ... most strange ....

@4u2ges .... I must confess - I didn't check your link.   .... Oh well, how about that - we've all discovered the same thing! 
Well - at least we can say with much greater certainty - that the problem really does *exist* 

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time!   - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

did you put in a bug report? cause it looks like you solved the problem for this particular case.?  (assuming he used spotlights and among other things) 
also make sure to tell them how to reproduce it in the report? 
since it appears the original poster is gone. (unless this is an alt you created in order to .. compete lol i dont put anything past some people) 
I'm not male so sorry my way of dealing with things are going to be different.   /shrug 

edit.. i suppose this thread did have one purpose it forced someone who had the problem to sit down and find out the cause.  so that is the silver lining.  

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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

There have been problems with spotlights and shadows in the past, which were solved in previous iClone versions (AFAIK), so it's a bit disheartening that they pop up again.

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It's strange the way it "bands."  It's more like "stripes," which is different from "stair-stepping."

For a while I was thinking they might be using some "8-bit math" resulting in too few levels of brightness, but it's more of a repeitious pattern.  It's not like what you see if you have an 8-bit height map with very small variations in height.

I wonder what would happen if each "stripe" (band) was reversed.


Definitely room for improvement.




For reference, this is what I originally expected to see (it looks like a geographical elevation contour map), but this is NOT the problem:

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Yeah this is not truly what I was speaking of I will try to reproduce it but for now.. when it comes to those spotlight bands.. usually its in a circle? spotlights are round? easy enough to tell when you pull back if its caused by those.   (unless there is a feature update i missed and we can now make custom ones? never know.. anyhow i dont use spotlights much with the introduction of the "new stuff" i dont need em as much so havent been paying attention to spotlights really) 

This is still not what I am seeing, but I dont think there is more that I can say.    Its easy enough to create a bunch of lines by baking out a normal map from a two tone grey piece.      What I see is probably not what others are seeing so I bow out for now.    If I have time to replicate it I will do so, but I do not think this is what we are looking at here at least its not what i am looking at hehe.   
here is a quicky but again really can't say until one looks at the thing.   


and here is how i created it.



and here is the box i was speaking of and why i said what i said after seeing that box in the corner.    

here is the render


and here is the way i caused the problem.  This is a heightmap with blur which is used often for displacement inside iclone.   


anyhow this is what i meant.   Again I dont know but this is what I saw and sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.



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"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Dr. Seuss

Look in the mirror for once sweetheart and ask yourself:
Why am I always keep clashing with people around me while nobody else has?
And why do I keep whining in almost every other post about being... mistreated... misunderstood.. misjudged?
May I be the one who has problems understanding?

Anyhow, I have no slightest intention to reply to the nonsense you posted here and PM me for some reason. I'd rather place you in ignore.