Hi there!
I have problems rendering GI. Whenever I render no matter the settings changed in (Exponents, number of Photons, photon radius and merge distance), I always get glowing ball shapes around my Master Beauty after enabling GI. Please help!! 
Attached are screenshots of the settings used.
(I am using directional light to emit photons btw)
Thank you in advance!!!
Using a directional light is likely the issue, as it’s an infinite light source, I’m not sure where the photons are shot from but they would be inaccurate.
Best to use an area light/portal light in this kind of lighting scenario.
try uncheck “export post effects” in render setting>Translation
edit: posted previous line without looking your image :hmm: . by looking the image you posted, you may need to tweak the radius and merge distance. also enable FG will help even those photon trace.
The easiest solution would be to put an area light with a portal light node attached on each window, turn on final gather and gi off. If you want to use gi, start with a large radius (like 50 or 100). This should smooth out the gi map but it will also be less detailed. To get more detail gradually decrease radius and raise the number of emitted photons on the light. Accuracy now is way too high, 500-1000 should be fine. Activating fg will also balance the gi solution.Never use gi alone.
If you are going to use any lights to emit photons to use GI you need to use final gather in combination with it.
Now most people make the mistake of just turning on final gather and GI together thinking it will all work out.
Nope.
In Mental Ray you’re going to want to tell final gather to use the photon look up so that final gather can then build its cleanup based on the photons placed in the scene. It will run through those photons and make an averaged out shading and clean it all up together for a final GI solution.
Don’t use importons for this method.
Just turn on GI and Final Gather but… the key is to go under the “final gather map” options tab and click… “precompute photon lookup” checkbox. This tells the final gather to look at the photons emitted from the GI and use them as the approximation instead of just making a GI final gather mess together.
Just tell the lights to emit photons. Go ahead and be generous. I put a million for the sun directional in the attached scene. Average 3 minutes on my 8 core at 960x540.
I attached an example scene.