Strange light plus render settings

[JakeMM]

Hi,

I've just been rendering a model in which the whole model is white. I've now gone and added in one texture and so have switched the colours to an off white.

I'm rendering the model as an animation with a hemispherical HDR sky.

The render however has one element in which a strange light or flare has appeared (seen in the centre of the attached image).

What is likely to have caused this and how do I get rid of it?

I rendered this animation on Easy07 as it was 280 frames long (and took about 90 seconds per frame.)

How does Easy07 compare to Animation03? (both are High+)

And which presets are best to stick with for animation?

Thanks

Edit: Have since spotted the light flares in a few other places, but the one shown is definitely the worst.

[Fletch]

This is known as a light leak or a light flare. It's caused because there are not enough lights in the scene for the final gather sampling rate in the render setting used. Easy answer, try the Flare Fix settings. And be sure when rendering an animation with only a moving camera to check the "reuse lighting" information. It will then render the light map for the whole scene only once, so that if there is a flare, at least it only stays in one place. But more importantly it keeps all the lighting even through the animation.
Subject: Sun and Sky only - experimental biased render settings

[JakeMM]

Thanks for the quick reply Fletch!

One last question, some presets say "FG" and some say "Flare Fix". What does FG stand for?

[Fletch]

For animating objects, use the animation render settings.

FG= Final Gather.

the following settings from the zip file are the best "value" I can find for now after quite some time experimenting, feel free to test further and get back to us. But I believe you will be happy with any of these for time/quality ratio. Be sure, again, when animating only camera to check "reuse lighting calculation" this means much quicker animation rendering.
03c
04
05a

Remember these settings are for SUN AND SKY ONLY scenes. They have quite high photon shooting and final gathering so if you have more than just sun and sky (or just HDR sky) then it may take a very long time to render or it will not render because the photon map will fill the RAM. The Easy settings will be great for scenes with more than say 4 lights up to perhaps 50 lights (just guesstimating here)