It's been driving me nuts the last few days and I haven't the faintest clue what is causing it. I deleted all lights from the scene, checked the normals, looked for internal geometry, even went back to my original model of the feather and that even has the same problem. It's really bizarre that it's only one feather out of the whole lot as they're all the same model, just scaled differently. Help!
The original render with the artifact happening at the top right. The scene had a sun light.
Closer look at the problem. Might've deleted the light at this point.
And the original model that I duplicated from. No lights in the scene.
If there's no answer, I think I'll just start from scratch.
Yes, that's not it. I did, however, find that I have some hidden faces where there should be no hidden faces, and that is probably the culprit right there. I just never noticed because I don't use face mode that often.
Oi, oi, oi. Time to fix it and see if it's the problem right there.
Fixed it, should be totally fine now, looks fine in the render stuff, what a pain in the butt, now to rebuild the wings with the corrected geometry. Ah, the joys of learning new software lol.
There were TWO hidden faces. It's faces all the way down!
Resolved.