Things being reflected that shouldn't be

The center box is set to reflect a hdr map, and under v-ray properties for the arrows I turned everything off, because I don’t want the arrows to be reflected by the box surface. However, as you can see there is still some black speckled sort of reflection of the arrows on the surface of the box. I have tried different image samplers, and turning on or off just about everything I can think of (using different kinds of lights, etc) that might be remotely relevant. I cannot make those “reflections” go away. Any ideas?

Have you also tried turning off visible to reflections/refractions in the the max object properties panel?

Yup, sure did

is it just specular occlusion? exclude the arrows from any lights

It looks like there are overlapping faces in the yellow arrows.

Best regards,
Vlado

Vlado, you’re a genius. I don’t know if there are actually overlapping faces or not -it’s a spline with a zero value extrude, but when I change the value to .1 it renders just fine. I should have thought of the overlapping faces thing as that has caused me other kinds of problems in the past. thanx --ds