I'm Trying Here...

But nothing is working. I emailed Skylar (don't shoot me if I spelled that wrong), and he said to make the blacklambert not black but a dark grey instead. So I did. He also said to make sure that there was geometry intersecting the hand mesh. There is. So I hope that this is right.

Render of the Final Gather layer.

Top view to show that I do have geometry intersecting the hand mesh.

Render of the Final Gather Inverse layer.

Render of the Tree Matte layer.