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I read this from Mihnea in another post about hidding IES emitter object:

The same goes for Max: right click the mesh, select object properties, uncheck "visible to camera".

Well, it doesn't work here. Neither from studio. The sphere shows as black (it emits light just as it should, no problem there).

Is anyone able to hide IES object?

You mean to hide it in viewport display or in the render?

In render. I cannot make it hide; always black sphere.

Have you tried to set it invisible to camera (right click->object properties->visible to camera off), because here it seems to work. If not, can you give me a sample scene? bogdan.coroi@gmail.com

I'm really sure I unchecked that; but don't know why I cannot reproduce it today. Maybe it was some bad geometry Sorry.

Nevertheless I've got another problem; the problem of the day is the following:



I put three spheres in the scene with the same IES material. The two on the left are hidden to camera, reflections and refractions and hidden to GI; the one on the right is not hidden to GI but it is hidden to camera, reflections and refractions.

As you can see the two on the left are still producing some kind of soft shadows. How could I make them dissapear?

If you export it to studio and render from there using the same settings (hidden to GI, reflections+refractions) do you get the same results?

Yep! Same result.

Sorry to bother you with this one.

Maybe Tom or Mihai can bring some light on this issue? In the meanwhile, can you send me the scene so we can check what's going on? bogdan.coroi@gmail.com

Sent!

I'm moving this to the main forum, since it's an engine issue and it's more visible over there.

Hi guys,

I had the same problem when playing around with IES. In 3dsMax you should go to > Object Properties > Rendering Control.
TICK OFF visibility to camera, reflection/refraction, receive and cast shadows. Furthermore, go to the Maxwell tab and
TICK 'Hidden To Global Illumination' for all relevant objects (remember to the last step again when copying those objects as
this setting will not be copied). You're best off doing this in one step after placing/copying all your emitter objects.

Also, you should make those spheres really small and very low poly as they're only 'stand in' geometry for as long as you
use IES in your emitter settings. In fact, you can use a single sided plane (two faces, check the normals as they should
point down to where you want your light target to be) in order to optimise your render. If you use 'white light' don't use
anything brighter than RGB 220 for further optimisation and less noise.

Now, having done all that I realised that there was still a tiny visible projection of those spheres on the ceiling of my scene.
I believe it has to do with the distribution of the caustics as the sphere is 'still in the way'. I'm not sure if this was the case
in previous releases but if you follow all those steps you can minimize the visibility of your emitting IES objects.

Hope that helps for now.

Also, you should make those spheres really small and very low poly as they're only 'stand in' geometry for as long as you
use IES in your emitter settings. In fact, you can use a single sided plane (two faces, check the normals as they should
point down to where you want your light target to be) in order to optimise your render.

This is not true. The sphere is used as the actual emitter. So if the ies file creates light rays in 360 degrees, a plane will not work correctly.

I have to admit that I haven't tested that last option yet but I assumed it is possible as my render doesn't change when
reducing the size or number of polygons of those spheres. I will certainly test it though...

Hopefully the rest of my post is true and is still valid as some sort of advise.

Ok, my apologies if I have caused confusion here. What Bubbaloo said is absolutely correct. I does not work with a plane or
single triangular face, at least not for the light (IES) type I have chosen. Strangely, it does also work with a cube although
there are artefacts obscuring the central lightbeam.

So I assume that the best solution is a sphere with a resolution of 4 segments (8faces, smoothing turned off) in order to
keep the number of polygons and the noise level at the minimum? Or would spheres with more segments reveal a higher level
of detail from the IES? Anyone tested this yet or has any input?

Cheers