Maxwell Render | Official public forum

in former versions of maxwell, joining several objects and assigning an emitter to it made it appear as 1 light object, which was convenient to modify the light all at once (like with many fluorescent tubes in a factory, they don't have separate intensities normally).
but now, joined light objects become separate objects in the mxs file. is there a way to avoid this (apart from connecting all the light objects, which makes the file more complex)?

tnx
wim