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Hi all,

I hope someone can help as this is driving me nuts.

I have set a scene with emitters on stair treads etc. Fire shows what I would expect but when I go to do a final render it looks completely different as in, the emitters seem to have lost all their power. If I do a region render then they seem to come back on??????

I have built the model in modo 801. I have updated the modo plugin to the latest maxwell beta. I have also tried exporting and then opening in maxwell studio to do the rendering from their instead and get the same results.

Maxwell Fire (note the lights on the stairs and the up lighters next to them)


Final Render (all the lights have died apart from the one under the handrail)


Region Render of the same scene (the lights seem to be trying to come back, no adjustment to camera or anything else from the final render above)


I created all my lights via Mexd and when I go to save them it seems to save a ghost bitmap with them - if I open the file in studio it is asking of for the bitmap used in the emitter material of which there is none since the material is purely an emitter??

The issue here is emitter priority. Since you have sunlight in the scene with emitters, you should raise the emitter power to approach the power of the sun , then turn on multilight and adjust the emitters back down.

Hey Brian thank you for answering!!

Would adjusting the slider value in multi light during render do the same thing? So I can then basically ramp a 200w bulb up to sun power? Or is it better to set all your emitters high before render and then do as you advise?

You need to do it before sending the render, so that the engine will give equal priority to sun and emitters. Then, during or post render, you can adjust the emitters back down to realistic levels.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.