[Daniel Hruby]

I find it difficult to dial in the correct wattage of emitters since the size of the emitters will affect the actual intensity of the emitted light regardless of the wattage set in the material. This essentially nullifies the point of using Watts as a unit of light intensity. This alone is an issue, but not really the point of my post here.

We have the luxury of using Multilight to dial in the lighting balance once the rendering is underway AND we have the ability to save that light balance as an Emixer file within Maxwell. What I propose is a solution that will allow us to dial in our lights and then forget them. The process would work in one of two ways.

1. You set up your ligts in the plug in using best guess on intensity.
2. Render using Multi light and set all your lights the way you want them.
3. Save out emixer file.
4. Load emixer file into ArchiMaxwell interface back in ArchiCAD.
5. At this point, the method diverges into two approaches which one or the other may work.

A. The plugin would look at the values of the emixer data file and then go to each emitter material in ArchiCAD and multiply the wattage values set in the material to correctly set the wattage to match the output from the emixer. I would also set the values of ISO, Shutterspeed and environment intensity upon export.

B. More simply, the plug in would just use the EMixer data table to convert the wattage values, ISO, Shutterspeed, etc. upon export and the AC materials would never be touched. This is probably the easiest (or only) way, but would only work if you still leave Multilight enabled, since you can only load Emixer files in to Maxwell if Multilight is on.

The point of this approach is to allow us to TURN OFF Multilight in order to speed up the rendering. When Multilight is turned off, you can not load an Emixer file in Maxwell. So there needs to be some sort of internal conversion process within the exporter.

What most people don't realize is that for every light group used in Multilight (think slider on the Multilight dashboard) the MXI file size is multiplied. So a 100MB MXI without Multilight would become 1GB with 10 light groups! And the memory used in rendering will go up by 2x or more as well.

We could use Multilight to dial in the basic light mix over a short period of rendering and then turn OFF Multilight and use the Emixer data and enjoy a faster and less memory intensive render.