Final render different from viewport render

Hello there ! I ran into a strange problem yesterday. I was making some quick lighting tests in a very basic scene lit only by an area light and an HDRI. The scene is completely closed (four walls + floor and ceiling), with the light source and camera inside the room.
Now, when I hit shift+Z to get my viewport render this is what I’ve got :


But when I render the scene, the result looks rather different, as though the area light wasn’t taken into account :


If anyone had an idea…:smiley:

It could be because you add the area light on another layer and not include it in the render layer.

http://www.blender.org/manual/render/post_process/layers.html

That’s one of the first things I’ve checked but everything is okay : no layer was excluded. Anyway, I made a new .blend and imported all of the furnitures in, except for the walls and light and now it renders perfectly fine. I’m curious of what could’ve caused this problem, though.

Unless you post the faulty .blend file, I’m afraid we’ll never know…:wink: