Help! Artifacts!

[xiaoli]

Hi guys, I am a newbie at this, and I always run into the same problem in rendering my scenes. Please see attached image. Rendered with Maya 2008 / MR 3.6ish.

 

I have a simple scene with some basic flat mia_materials and the preset chrome material applied to the light fixtures. The fixtures each have a spot light. There are two area lights, one on the left and one on the right to provide additional lighting to the scene. Only Final Gather is used (250 Accuracy / 1 Density / 100 Interpolation)

 

As you can see I get weird speckles in the shadows of the ball. I always run into this problem whenever there are reflective materials in my scene, and I am using a mental ray area light.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]39621[/ATTACH]

[xiaoli]

I should also ad that two things seem to solve the issue

 

- If I remove the area light from the scene

 

- If I move the chair back so it doesn't cut into the shadow of the sphere

[mdviz]

Try increasing the shadow samples on the area light. this will icrease the render time somewhat.