Troubleshoot final gather causes flicker

If you are rendering a scene with final gather and the lighting flickers, follow these steps:

1. Enable the Optimize for Animations option under the Final Gathering Tracing section, Final Gathering Tracing subsection in the Indirect Lighting tab of the Render Settings: mental ray tabs. The Optimize for Animations option sets the final gather mode to multiframe.

   See Render Settings: mental ray tabs for more information.

2. Set the Render Mode to render final gather maps using this command:

   setAttr mentalrayGlobals.renderMode 3;
   

3. Set the scene to render a representative subset of frames or a coarse version of the animation.
4. Set Rebuild to Freeze under the Final Gathering Map section of the Indirect Lighting tab of the Render Settings: mental ray tabs.
5. Set Render Mode to full render using this command:

   setAttr mentalrayGlobals.renderMode 0;
   

6. Fully render the scene.
   Note:

   While this workflow avoids flicker, some parts of the scene may still suffer in quality if an insufficient number of final gather points is found.