best settings for interior night shots with emitters

[SurfingAlien]

Hi!
I have serarched and read here and there but still cannot get a decent solution for this... so here I am asking if there's some further trick to avoid huge hotpixels/firefly in night interior scenes with emitters.

I apologize for what is probably the n-th thread on this subject and the lack of image (it's a WIP for a client I cannot show at the moment.

scene: a simple interior with a dining table with chairs and stuff (not too much). 3 hanging lights (emitters) and 3 emitting cubes laying on the table (as they were candle lights). the room is wide open, i.e. I have floor, ceiling and back wall with the other 3 walls missing.

environment: I tried both with a floattexture with very low powre and daylight at 22pm

materials: I removed any unnecessary glossy and bumpmap, there's no glass

emitters: texture emission using a kind of softbox image with shaded borders. I tried a bunch of combination of power, etc. at no avail (usually I'm able to get a decent result playing with these values but not in absence of a proper env light as now). I also tried with IES but I can't say I totally get how they work in Octane yet (saw the video tutorial, simply cannot see how different settings change the light in the scene)

kernel: tried both PT and PMC

hotpixel: removal set to 0 (usually I don't need to go that low...)

thanks for any advice, just a newbie in Octane yet...

cheers,
Alessandro

[SurfingAlien]

self reply...

ouch, I forgot my "simple" cube emitters actually had 54 quads each and 3 levels of subD applied! lowering their emission to a min (to keep the "emissive" look) and replacing with 6 "ghost" cubes as real emitters solved most of the problems! I was able to set up some more glossy mats too...

BTW, don't know when it has been implemented (been away for a while) but changing maxsamples and not having to restart the cooking is a huge step forward, thanks a lot for that Refractive team!