Controllers

Owned by Systems Next Limit (Unlicensed)
27 Dec, 2016
2 min read

In Maxwell Multilight™, controllers refer to lights imported in an mxi file. Each MXI (exported with the Multilight™ option enabled) will be represented by a controller, so that you can modify the lights values for thatproject. The number of controllers you have will depend on the number of emitters you have in the scene (MXI file).

 

ISO and Shutter are always displayed when importing an MXI file, and the other light controllers will depend on the lights you have exported in the MXI file.

  • ISO: Before digital, this referred to the camera films sensitivity to light. For digital, and for our purposes, it's a way of "boosting" the sensors response to light, making it more/less sensitive. A higher ISO value means more sensitivity, thus less light is needed, or a shorter shutter speed can be used to achieve the same exposure. Please note that unlike a digital camera that shows more noise in the image as you raise its ISO level, rendering in Maxwell does not introduce more noise if you use a higher ISO.

 

  • Shutter: the shutter in a camera is a light occluding piece of material put in front of the sensor to block light from reaching it. When you take a photo, the shutter temporarilymoves out of the way to expose the sensor to light.The speed at which this is done is named shutter speed. The faster it is, the shorter time the sensor is exposed to light. Thus if you have a very low light scene you need to use a long exposure (such as 1/10th of a second) to avoid a totally black ("under exposed") render. The opposite is true, for example a bright daylight scene. In this case you need a much shorter shutter speed (such as 1/500th of a second) to avoid a totally white ("over exposed") render.

 

Each light controller will be displayed with a handle to modify the intensity of that light. The handle modifies using the light value lumens.

Additionally, each light controller will have their own value representation as lumens  which can be modified by typing a new value directly in this field.

The Solo button  turns off all lights, except the selected light or another light also in Solo mode.

The Mute button  turns off the selected light.