Is this a light leak?

[kevin miller]

Down in the corner of the space near the center of image on the cove base. I can't figure out why or how. The cove base is a loft object. Still learning MR so I am open to any thoughts. I have been looking at some archived posts but I am not getting a clear answer as to why this may be happening or how to fix. I thought it could happen with how certain elments or object came together but this is a continuous loft.

[kevin miller]

Playing around with this a little more and I minimize (not eliminate) the extent of that light leak if I increase the amount of steps in the loft path. I minimize it even more if I apply a turbosmooth modifier to it. I am still new to max but I am assuming this means I have a geometry issue maybe? I have other identical lofts in this scene with no issues. I do not want to have to apply smooth modifiers since my face count goes up a bit plus it annoys me why this loft is an issue and should be any different. Any suggestions how to eliminate this light leak would be great.

[Ihab Kalache]

maybe you have some inverted normals?

[kevin miller]

okay, I solved the light leak problem but it was a solution that no one shared and I am posting it for what it is worth. Knowing max, this will not work any other time as it seems like something quirky is always occurring but I figure it is usually my ignorance on the program. I simply converted the loft object to a editpoly and selected all faces and removed all smoothing int he smoothing groups dialogue. That's it. If someone could please enlighten me as to why this worked that would be great. It appears that max likes to assign a smoothing group whenever an object is created, is that true? When doing architectural work, planar objects like walls, floors, etc should not have a smooth group, I would think. Any thoughts on this?

[Duncan Howdin]

You need to turn off smooth length in your loft under surface parameters..

cheers