Extremely bright whites/sunlight reflections in outdoor auto Iray render

RenderPretender

As  the subject suggests, I'm doing some outdoor automotive renders using a single commercial HDRi environment. Even though I have the camera lights off, any bright spot on the car - and even small white flowers or other light spots in the grass or in the background environment - are VERY bright... almost like an unintended bloom. Is there a setting in the environment lighting that I should be looking at in order to reduce or otherwise modulate this effect?

Thank you.

Half Life

Burn Hightlights could be one setting to modify, Exposure Value would be another.

RenderPretender

Half Life said:

Burn Hightlights could be one setting to modify, Exposure Value would be another.

Thank you. But upon experimenting with those settings, it seems that they either brighten or dim the environment lighting, but the "hot spots" persist.

JamesJAB

There is a setting in the render options:

Editor tab
Filtering
Bloom Filter Enable

Make sure that this is turned off.

Half Life

Burn Highlights (as the name suggests) only has effect on the brighter parts of the image-- a setting of zero will have the least burning.

Otherwise the only setting I can think of is maybe you accidentally enabled the bloom filter. However all of this is just guessing without actually seeing an image.

AlmightyQUEST

Bloom didn't unintentionally get turned on, did it? What HDRI and rest of the scene are you using?

novastrider

Agreed, the options most responsible for that effect are either Highlights or Bloom, it's what they do. Otherwise the HDRI might be too bright and you need to lower the overal Intensity.

RenderPretender

Indeed, I think bloom was still somehow on from a prior portrait! Thank you and bingo!