I'm having trouble rendering simple spheres with an earth graphic on it for some infographics animation.
One sphere is glossy blue, while the other is slightly larger with an image that goes into transparency, so only the landmass is shown, and casts a shadow on the blue sphere.
I've set up the scene with an HDR and a couple of area lights so it looks better.
The render looks fine when I see the progress, but when I play it back, I notice there's some TINY flickering going on, as if there's something obstructing the area lights. 10 frames can be good, then theres every other frame of flickering for 30-40 frames, and then a couple of good frames again, and.. so on..
I've tried adjusting diffuse and glossy depth. I switched off the area lights, and the flickering disappeared, but now the render doesn't look as good.
Edit:
I increased sampling on the aera lights (default is 1, I increased to 3), don't know how far it's necessary to increase, but it did not have any effect.
Any suggestions on what I may try?