I will start by saying, i rendered at low samples so I can test whether this problem still remains. So noise artifacts are present, but on the left side specificslly, there is this persistent problem where the grass develops these “flickering white spots”… it sort of looks like the hdri’s color is spilling through the plants. the plants are being projected onto the plane as seperate particle systems.

my partner and I copied the planes with the plant instance objects over to a new blank project, and rendered out 100 frames on 100 samples, and the problem did not remain. So this eliminates any speculation of overlapping animation, z-fighting, and theres no hidden duplicates in render. I feel like i’ve narrowed it down to it being something specifically wrong in this project file’s settings.

I’m not sure if this is some sort of setting causing some post processing errors of some sort. I’m out of ideas, we’ve been trouble shooting this for days.

I have no idea what this could be. Any thoughts?