Maya Lighting & Rendering 2: Mental Ray Part 1 - Samples & Quality Control **Somewhat Incomplete**

Since I completed another tutorial from this set, I thought I'd go back and begin going through the rest of them. This tutorial was about how to improve the quality of a render while also trying to make the render time as short as possible. I ran into some problems with this tutorial, which I have still not yet been able to figure out. Under the tutorial video there were instructions on preferences that had to be changed before beginning the tutorial...I followed them and I restarted Maya. I ran into a problem when using the mental ray tab after ticking the 'Use Light Shape' box under 'Area Light's, no matter what I put in the High Samples, the quality does not change (which is shown int he screenshots where the samples could be up to 128 but it is still grainy and the render time does not increase when compared to something like 16 samples). I continued with the tutorial anyway but obviously I did not get a very nice looking render at the end and I want to/need to figure out what has gone wrong. I'm not sure if there's something like a plug-in or another setting I need to make sure is ticked, but if anyone has an idea (I searched online and I also tried creating a new area light to see if the light was bugged but I had no luck) please let me know.

This image shows that the samples are at 128, but the image is still grainy and the render time is only 29 seconds.