Quote:
Originally Posted by renderhaus
...I changed my areas to points and took the mr Physical Sky out of use in the background Environment Map (left over after Daylight deleted).
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Then Spock-logic suggests the only possible cause is your area lights. Sorry to chime in late, but your problem is most probably because you were using spherical area lights. They "dilute" the samples around the whole scene but by replacing them with disc area lights and setting your high/low samples just right, you're aiming all that sampling info where you want it - on the subject. I often find with problematic area lights that a low sample value of half the high sample value will fix the problems (for eg, try highSamples=64, lowSamples=16/24/32 until your specular smoothes). Not sure about Max options, but in Maya the area light has theses sample channels, highSamples, highSampleLimit, lowSamples. If the highSampleLimit=1, then once the light has "hit" once, it will revert to the lowSamples value, so increasing the lowSample value will retain the quality. On a similar note, if you're using a procedural map for the A&D's reflectivity to generate the brushed effect, filtering the map can also help as the map is what's providing the info that governs how the area light will reflect back to the camera (ie specular info).
S.