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Different Emission modes for Area type
- Color emission allows to choose choosing a particular uniform color of emission and the intensity in specific units. When you choose Power and Efficacy, Lumens or Candelas the intensity will be distributed uniformly over the surface of the emitting object (watch out, as a 100W emitter will barely produce any light if assigned to a 10x10m plane, but will look very bright if applied to a 1x1cm plane. The intensity when you use Luxes (lm/m2) and Luminance (cd/m2) on the other hand, will vary depending on the size of the object. The look of a 10x10m plane will be very similar to a 1x1cm one, but a smaller one will actually emit less light than the bigger one.
- Temperature emission specifies both the intensity and color based on the color temperature value.
- HDR Image emission allows to choose choosing an image to emit light (a TV screen could be achieved with this). Although it is strongly advised to use HDR or MXI files, you can also use other low dynamic range images as jpg, png and so on. As units cannot be specified for this, you can change its intensity with a multiplier.
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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 setting the color of the light.
IES type options
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- The Spot type simulates a standard spotlight. It generates a cone with an emitting 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 setting 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,...).
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Spot type options
- Blur feature allows to modify modifying the hardness of the shadows. As you increase its value, the size of the emitting polygon increases, producing softer shadows.
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- Projected texture box allows to load loading 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. In this case, the falloff angle grows to the inside of the main cone creating a vignetting effect and darkening the corners of the image.
You can find more information about how Spots work in Maxwell in on this page: Spot emitters
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Different options in Select and Manipulate mode
Intensity handle
The intensity handle allows to modify modifying the intensity of the light just by dragging the small box along the light's axis. The small blue dot represents 0 intensity; by default, the manipulator will show 1m away from the blue dot; this represents 10000 lumens. The light changes quadratically to make it easier to select either low or high intensities.
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This graphic shows how the light intensity grows quadratically with the distance
Additionally, the color of the intensity handle changes with the color of the light in order to give an idea of how the light will look like.
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