Hey, I have a little question about final gather. Been working on getting more photorealistic results (thanks for the advice on my previous post, Pure_morning) and getting it working pretty well, but I'm having some artifacts in my shadows. At first I thought it was a problem with global illumination, because the blotchiness looks like it could be derived from photons, but it still happens with just final gather (in fact in this image, I'm not sure that global illumination has any effect, only having final gather on seems to produce the same result).


500 Final Gather Rays

2000 Final Gather Rays

4000 Final Gather Rays

The problem I'm talking about is the blotchiness, mostly apparent in the shadow but also in the paint in places, although it takes some comparison to see it (such as in the 2000 ray image, above the front wheel well where the hood moves into the side panel)

What is causing this? It does seem to get better as I up the number of rays, but 4000 is pretty high already and the render times are going up a LOT. Enough that I didn't want to go up to 8000 unless I have to. Is there a setting I'm missing? Or is something else causing this?