[Jesper Pedersen]

This may well have been covered in another thread/tutorial, but it might be a useful tip anyway.
We have noticed that Maxwell has serious problems handling geometry with emitter materials, so we using an opacity map to give the impression of more complex geometry. For example, see the sample render below showing a simple plane object with a bitmap in the maxwell material's opacity channel. So the entire scene is lit by just 2 faces of geometry!

http://www.pedersenfocus.ie/TechSupport ... %20map.jpg

We are working on some night views for a few projects and will be using opacity maps to generate the illusion of hundreds of ceiling lights in an office building. The files are certainly much easier to work with and, although we've yet to test this on a high-res render, our early tests look very promising.

I'll post the final results in a few days.
Any thoughts or tips on how to further optimise lighting of complex scenes using emitters would be much appreciated.

Jesper

[Bubbaloo]

Interesting test!

[Fernando Tella]

Something you probably know by now: when you mask an emitter you are also "masking its intensity" I mean, the intensity of the emitter is not distributed over the white parts only but over the whole plane so, when you mask the emitter you are effectively lowering the light emitted. Like if you had a 100W spotlight and put a filter in front.

[Bige]

so in theory this would also mean that you could simplify, lets say a insanely detaild, modeled lightbulb by making a material with a pure white mxi?

[Bige]

hmm i think i missunderstood the original post a bit, but still this might be something to test.

[choo-chee]

I've used it for long time, I had to "fake" the ies-pattern so I created a parallel b/w circles bitmap and mxied it....