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I am sure everyone hates me by now, but I need answers. I have some hanging lights, they are 10 feet long and are open on the top and bottom. I have them each filled with 4 8 sided cylinders (florecent tubes). The texture on them is 5000 lm. I just make an octagon for a spot light kind of, 800 lm. Blows them tubes out of the water.

My question. Am I better off putting 2 flat planes inside them hanging lights? Rather than the octagons?

The only way I can possibly get my room exposed even close to anything I have to have my shutter at 1 and my hanging lights at like 100,000.

Thanks for any input.

I am getting their....

AHHHHH I THINK ITS A BUG!!

I have can lights in my room. All with the exact same light material. They were really dim this whole time. So then I copied one of the can lights to its own mesh, then gave it the exact same mxm but on its own uv. Then its the right brightness!!! Its 10 times brighter!!

This was screwing me over for the last 3 days because I knew I had the lumens right but everything was super dim. Hence all the questions I have been asking. I am using modo and will be sending my scene file to Marton.

Unless there is something else you guys could figure out here?

It looks like I have to have each light on its own mesh?! So mad if this was it the whole time..... Which makes sense that it was spreading the light across all the polygons...

Delete this post in pity

Yes, 1000 lumens spread across say a 10m object, will results in 1000 lumens output, but spread over a large area so it will seem darker than if you had a 10cm large object with 1000 lumens.

To avoid this apparent change in brightness with the size of the emitter surface, you can instead of lumens use lumens/m2.

I'm not sure if UVs have anything to do with it though. When you separated that single can geometry, it got the full strength of the material applied to it, while for the others, the strength was "shared" between their entire surface since they where one single object.

Yeah that fixed my problem. I had to put each object on its own mesh. I actually did think it was the uvs at first because they were all spread across the uv space and small. I took one of them and make them as big as the uv space and it didn't chance.

It was just taking that 2000 lumens and spreading it across like 30 can lights. Instead of each individual one. This is why I was having such a hard time exposing my scene. I would have to turn the sun down to like .01 and my lights up to like 600000 to even get close to the middle. Very frustrating, but glad I figured it out.

Just sucks that I wasted so many days with the exporting problem (which is fixed) and trying to light with broken lights(which was technically my fault)

But now that I have it figured out, my workflow will increase 10x. This was my first project with maxwell so it makes sense I would run into some problems, but these ones murdered my timeline. But like I said, I am well on my way to being back to just as fast as I was in just modo. The maxwell quality is still not touched by modo in my opinion. But that could be because I hated all the modo settings and never understood them. With maxwell I can focus on more important things. So all though I was extremely frustrated these last two weeks, I can still easily see maxwell number one on my list for software in the future.