[simmsimaging]

Never tried using IES with Maxwell before and just sort of "found" the MxLight. I was pretty excited to see "spotlight" and "pointlight" in there, but the parameters on the spotlight don't seem to be working in any obvious way (angle doesn't change the focus etc). I couldn't find any docs on this tool - do you have any info on how to make better use of it?

Thanks /b

[Mihnea Balta]

Those settings just create a cone or sphere and apply an emitter material to it. They're supposed to spare you the trouble of making a separate piece of geometry with a material, they are not true analytic light models, because the engine doesn't have that internally. You can see the geometry that gets created if you open an exported scene in Studio.

[simmsimaging]

Thanks Mihnea. I was pretty pumped to see the potential for spotlights in there, too bad

I wonder how hard it would be to implement something that works like a spotlight in Maxwell. I know it's been covered many times over the years, but I'm actually thinking of something like the directionality parameter of the VrayLight. It basically just adds a spinner that allows you to make the light more coherent with 0 being random dispersion as a Maxwell emitter and 1 being all light rays are perfectly parallel to the emitter.

It lets you create "area spots", especially when combined with emitter maps that vignette the edges.

It would be functionally like using a grid on a real light.

Something like that would be a huge asset in Maxwell, allowing a far more efficient use of the rays, no?

/b