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There are two main types of lighting used in Maxwell Render: Environmental and Physical.

Environmental Lighting

This type of lighting, which contributes globally to lighting the rendered image, may use one of four types: Sky Dome, Physical Sky, Image Based, and None. Environmental lighting is set up in the plugin using the Environment tab in the plugin's Scene Manager window.

Physical Lighting

This type of lighting is concerned with the creation and use of individual emitters; in Maxwell, emitters consist of geometry which has been assigned an emitter material. The basic steps involved in creating an example rectangular light, then, are these:

1. Draw a plane.
2. Select a material, as described here.
3. Set the material to use an emitter Character type.
4. Assign this material to the plane.
5. Render the scene.

The geometry determines the physical position and directionality of the light, while the emitter material determines the nature of the light that is emitted from that geometry. Besides for these creation steps, there are two main factors to consider:

Surface Normals

In Maxwell, light is emitted according to the normals of the mesh in question. In SketchUp, the normals point in the direction of a face's front material, so use SketchUp's right-click > Reverse Faces command if necessary. Since this alters the geometry physically, it is necessary to use the Re-export Scene function in Maxwell Fire, before changes will be reflected in the rendering.

Emitter Power