Multilight FAQ

Will the Multilight Color + Intensity mode render slower than the classic Multilight Intensity mode?

No. The Multilight Color + Intensity mode stores not only the intensity information of each emitter separately, but also the spectral color information of each separately, to allow you adjust each emitter to get full control over the resulting image. The process now will consume extra memory (as the spectral contribution of each emitter is stored is a separate buffer, which needs more memory per emitter in the scene) but it won't affect the render speed.

 

I set the output to Color Multilight but some of my emitter sliders don't show the color chip?

Changing the color of emitters can work only for regular emitter materials because they specify intensity and color separately.

  • With emitters defined by Color Temperature, the emission color is tied to the intensity of the light, just like in real light sources. Therefore, when you lower the light intensity, you not only get a dimmer light, but also a red color, according to the Kelvin scale. By raising the light intensity, you not only get a brighter light, but also a bluer emission.


  • Physical Sky light is not editable with a color picker. Its color depends on the sun’s temperature, atmospheric conditions and location and time in the scene. Changing it with a random Color Picker would impair the light correctness of the Physical Sky light.

  • HDR (textured) emitters can't change their color and intensity separately because both are tied to an HDR map.

  • IES aren't supported because of the way these types of emitters specify their intensity values