After constructing a model of my desk, I placed it in a generic square room with a pole light opposite the desk pointing up for full room illumination off the ceiling. I made all the calculations for the radiosity sample area, but when I went to render the shot a most unusual artifact, one that I have never seen on the program before, came up. The artifact is solid black and appears everywhere. When jittering is off, the artifact shows up as a massive black polygon, but when jittering is on, hundreds of tiny black squares appear everywhere. Also, the level of -- I will call them striations -- have increased phenomenally. It looks like my drywall surface is made of stainless steal. It is quite bad at this point. Any help you guys can give me would be greatly appreciated. I am at a loss now. I have tinkered with every possible setting in radiosity, and to no avail.

The fallowing are pictures of the wicked anomaly. For the most part, the pictures are done with prograssive rendering, but I have made a few small boxes to make a full 16 pass render on. The first is without jittering, the second with jittering. I hope you guys can help.

no pix?

Oh, Wait... there they are!

But, I know where to find jittering now... but I thought I looked in final gathering....? hmmm.

A:M distributes the final gathering samples among the multi-pass passes no mattter if it is doing a final rendering or a render to screen, progressive or not. Check your multipass settings and set it to 1 if you want to test how it looks with progressive render.

Here's the progressive render with the 1 pass. The problem is still prevalent... and boy... it is spotty.

first is the non jittering, the second is with jittering.

There is a patch or an object somewhere in your scene which is totally black or which have its radiance set to 0%.

I went through the entire model, and there were no groups that were anywhere near black, and every one of the surfaces had a -not set- property for radience. So to check, i turned all of the models groups to have 100% radience, but i still got the problem. However, when i deactivated the desk model the artifacting disapeared. Not sure what on the model is causing this... there's nothing special about it, or any of it's properties. Here is a picture of the model i'm working with. The line is appearing again on the wall in this shot... not sure why.

I get the feeling that animation master doesnt like me these days.