Area light with specular turned off causes blocky shadows

[seltzdesign]

While rendering a scene with several area lights - one of which has specular and reflections completely turned off - I noticed that the shadows in the rendering are blocky or pixelated. If I turn off the light with the specular turned off, the shadows look better, even though you can still see a tiny bit of blockiness.

With the light turned on:



With the light turned off (notice there is still some blockiness):



Any idea what might be causing this? We can't use these as product images like that. I thought buying a renderer for several hundred dollars would give reliable results, but it appears I was wrong about that assumption.

[seltzdesign]

I might have found the bug. We have several scenes in one file, each contained in a closed box, basically like a studio.

By default scenes are set to use adaptive lighting with a setting of 8, but we have a total of 11 lights in the scene, but only 3 inside the box that create the renderings above. One would assume V-Ray might recognise which of the lights are even visible to the current camera, but it appears its more brute force than that and randomly decides to exclude one of the lights in the scene, but not per rendering, but per bucket.

Turning off adaptive lights "solved" this.

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hey seltzdesign,

Is it possible to forward us a sample with the issue reproducible so we can check? Much appreciated!