Extremely Noisy Lights

[maru]

Ok, yes, it looks like we can't render with the HDRI at .01 and then ramp it up using lightmix because the environment lightmix element seems to include influences of the other lights in the scene.
Powering down the lights and adjusting the camera exposure to compensate for the .01 HDRI results in the same behavior as the 1.0 HDRI, which makes sense I guess.
Any ideas on a half-way solution in the meantime? It is prohibiting us from being able to render clean exterior night animations.

All of this is expected. LightMix should be usually used to introduce only minor changes in light intensity and color, not really to turn day into night or vice versa (unless you have the time to allow longer rendering). One "workaround" is using the ">Scene" button in 1.6. This will bake intensities and colors into the scene, and then it should render noise-free. Of course you will then lose the ability to use LightMix in the way it was used before using the >Scene button.

@4b4 there is no "render perfect" checkbox in the Max version, as this is done automatically like Dippndots mentioned.

[Dippndots]

Hey Maru, the HDRI i'm using is a dusk one (CG Source 1deg) so the environment is relatively dark and in the original lightmix setup, I had normalized everything so all my lights were .5-2 and my environment was left on 1.

Do you think using 1.6 to bake these in would result in noticeably less noise?