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- The IES type generates an invisible ball which is the origin of emission and allows to assign an .ies or .ldt file to it. These files are usually provided by the lamps or spots manufacturers and represent the light distribution generated by the whole lamp. IES type is particularly useful to represent exactly the look of a particular lamp in the market without having to model the whole lamp. Maxwell includes a small collection of these type of files in its installation folder for you to test. In its panel you will find a multiplier for the intensity and an option to show the lobe (a point cloud representation of the "shape" of the light distribution) in the viewport. It also allows to set the color of the light.
IES type options
- The Spot type generate simulates a standard spotlight. It generates a cone with an emitting disk inside. The height of the cone and the distance between the apex and the emitting disk can be set in the Maxwell Render rollup. The emitter material is applied only on the disk; a diffuse grey material is applied on the occluder cone.
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- polygon inside (a small triangle); this geometry is always hidden to camera at render time, although it's visible in reflections and refractions unless you activate the option to hide it. It allows to set the cone angle (the highlight area) and the fall-off angle (measured from the cone angle), as well as the type of fall-off (linear, quadratic,...).
Spot type options
- Blur feature allows to modify the hardness of the shadows. As you increase its value, the size of the emitting polygon increases, producing softer shadows.
- Projected texture box allows to load an image. In this case the gizmo of the MxLight will change into a pyramid resembling the proportions of the loaded image and the light will work as a cinema projector. You can project any image format, both low dynamic range images (like jpg, tga or png), high dynamic range images (like hdr, exr or tiff32) or even procedural textures.
You can find more information about how Spots work in Maxwell in this page: Spot emitters