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Sorry, I am new to maxwell, but I use Modo. I think this is more of a maxwell question than a modo specific one.

If I am making ceiling light, Lets say a plastic piece is flush with the ceiling but there is a bulb inside, do I put my emitter on the plastic piece or do i make a bulb inside and put an emitter on it. Then the light goes through the plastic piece? Or do I avoid the whole bulb inside and go with something different...

I am new like I said.. but I have only done like studio lighting that you won't see by the camera.

Thanks

Cody

You can put the emitter behind the diffuser, but it will take longer to render. What I have done in the past is model the light correctly, render a straight on view of the lit up light, then use that rendered image as a HDR emitter and apply it to a simple plane.

That's a nice little trick. My thanks for that! I will be starting to send my renders to ranch so maybe I will do it the diffuser way. Thanks again.

Try using a super-simple emitter hidden-to-cam for the scene illumination, and put the real emitter + diffuser behind the hidden one such that real one cant emit any light into the scene (so it cant add any noise to the scene)

In other words; the camera sees the complex diffused emitter but the scene (gi) only sees the simple emitter.

Got it thanks. Another question for ya. If I do use a ceiling tile texture, and tile it on the ceiling, how do i add the lights in the ceiling tile? Am I better off just modeling the whole thing with the grid and all instead of trying to use a texture?

Maybe a relevant question in your case:

Would the actual light bulb be seen in a photograph, if you where to shoot a photo of this space and have the room properly exposed, OR, would the ceiling emitters simply look like bright white circles(the diffuser itself is just completely white in the photo)? Because if they would look completely white in the photo (most probably), then the easiest is simply to apply an emitter component to those ceiling lights. You can first create a common white plastic, using the Opaque material assistant for example, convert it to Advanced, then add an emitter component to any of the layers - doesn't matter which one. Then using Multilight, as you turn off this emitter it will start revealing the white plastic.

I wanted to do the ceiling lights that fit into the tiles. Like a basic office light with ceiling tiles. So I don't think they would be completely white. So I might go with the light inside shining through for the look. Then add an invincible emitter for illumination. I also thought about doing the straight on shot with the bulb inside, then just apply that image as an hdr like stated earlier.

My question is this though.

If I use one of the textures in the web gallery for a ceiling tile. Then I set my x and y tiling for all the image maps. How do I put in the lights I model onto that? Model them in there and then adjust the texture to size and line them up manually is all I can think of.