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On mac w/ z plug-in, version 1 & 1.1, emitters never cast light, or cast light once, and then stop working.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Gary

I'm having the same issue.....can't get emitters to cast light and yes the normals are in the right direction

Have you checked the Efficiency level? I have noticed that all my emitters that are imported from Form Z have a very low Efficiency level around 12%. Also noticed that since 1.1 they come in with input set to "Temperature of emission" instead of "Color +Luminance".

Tim

Emitters work fine here. (Mac OSX 10.4.7 - formZ 5.5.3 - MaxwellZ plug-in 1.1 - MXCL 1.1)

Check the Scene Scale setting in the plug-in tool palette. If set to 1, the formZ geometry may arrive 100x its original size in MXCL. Emitter power remains unchanged and thus far too low to light the scene.

Low efficiency is not unusual depending on your type of emitter. Incandescent bulbs convert just about 10% of the consumed power into visible light waves. Try the preset emitter mxm's (a-team special/jomaga). They produce convincing realistic results here.

just out of interest, for those of you who have emitters working, are you picking emitter from the dialogue box (the basic Beta versions) or are you opening a mxm emitter ?

Hi rmulley

I am using mxm for emitters and materials.
Now I tried setting some materials and emitters in formZ (basic style). This gets a bit confusing.

Emitters really are very dark. But not black. I get an output. But there's no difference between 10KW and 100KW emitters.. (stupid scene, 20m x 20m space, fstop 8, shutter 1/1, ISO 100, SL 8)




I have no time for proper testing. But there seem to be more oddities in the material export to MXCL. I dont know how the basic materials work and remember that they do not translate easily into mxm. However, when I check the exported mxs in studio, the mxm are uneditable emitters [EDIT: not true, they are editable], diffuse seem to translate properly, plastics are always highly reflective (10% rough in Z translate into 0,1% rough mxm; render all black). No fun.

I stick to using mxms for all my surfaces.
But this should be checked by some A-Team or NL Pro please.

Sebastian

Are you rendering straight to MXCL or do you open the MXS in Studio first? If you haven't opened the MXS in Studiio first, I would so you can check that all of your settings are exporting properly out of Form Z.

try loading your scene into studio and then overload one of the studio lighting preset scenes and check if the scales match. A very large or small scene will do strange things in maxwell.

These "tests" were rendered straight from formZ to MXCL to check this workflow and reproduce the black emitters mentioned on top of this thread.

I would not use this workflow again. Too little control and too many surprises.
Doing a full mxs check in Studio after exporting seems more time-consuming than working with mxm files in the first place.

I suspect that the whole formZ basic material export translation is a mess in 1.1, my two cents to be found here http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... hp?t=17446

S

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ruins

hey 8etty,

if you ever want to talk about it... , let us know.
we are here to help !

formax wrote:did anyone get emitters to work?

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