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Or is there more to it than that?

I understand the black body radiation physics well enough, I'm just looking for a workaround for broken correlated color in the Maya plugin.

Is a simple, well-chosen rgb color the same as a correlated Kelvin color temperature?

I don't have an answer for you but i'm interested if you could explain a little more about your question for when and answer does arrive. I feel like I can kind of decipher what you're asking but i'm not sure. Feel free to explain for us simpletons!

He is asking if the Kelvin temperature based emitter options (eg; 3000,5000, 6500, etc) are simply colors like any other colors, or do they have some special/unique property.

The answer is they are colors like any other colors, but RGB is not necessarily the proper way to think of colors in Maxwell since everything is actually XYZ internally. So I am not sure if you can get the same effect using RGB specifiers in an external program.

Best,
Jason.

I guess I'm asking about metamers - colors that look identical but behave differently because they are made of different wavelength recipes.

For example we could have a yellow that is made of red and green. Everyone in CG knows that yellow. Pass it through a prism and it will disperse into red and green again.

But in Maxwell, at least internally, as I understand it, there could be a yellow that looks the same as the first yellow but be made of a spectral distribution more tightly gathered around let's say 570 nm so it's more like a yellow laser that can't be broken into red and green by a prism because it's not made of red and green.

So is the orange from 3500 degrees K a metamer or truly identical to the same looking orange from the RGB color picker?

(I remember in the very early days of Maxwell there was talk of a spectral color picker that seemed to go away. Too complicated for the user, maybe)

In the meantime I'm running v 2.7 again.

No, the custom color and Correlated Color work differently. Correlated Color uses a spectrum just like Temperature emitter, except it allows you to set desired amount of power unlike Temperature type.

tom wrote:No, the custom color and Correlated Color work differently. Correlated Color uses a spectrum just like Temperature emitter, except it allows you to set desired amount of power unlike Temperature type.

Thanks. I thought that might be the case.

In the meantime, I think the most convenient thing for me as a Maya user is to stick with 2.7

What's exactly broken with the Maya plugin about it?

tom wrote:What's exactly broken with the Maya plugin about it?

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... 01&t=41620

The lights are always white, which seems to be the RGB default.

You could export MXS and correct it using Maxwell Studio. Well, at least until the plugin is fixed...