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I've got some can lights I'm using where the light is up inside towards the top and there's no lens. What I'm thinking of doing is using 2 emitters. One up inside the light that will be just bright enough to light the inside of the can. Rather than leaving it at that, which would be lighting the scene with mostly caustics, I'll add another emitter at the bottom of the can. This one is an ies which will be hidden to camera.

Does that sound like a pretty reasonable method?

-Brodie

You may find the IES sphere casts a shadow/blocks the light... I've not tried but it sounds reasonable otherwise.

Best,
Jason.

I did a test awhile back and it seemed to work ok. I think I may have hid the IES sphere to GI as well which probably took care of that. I'm mostly wondering if there's an even better way or if I'm misunderstanding the affect of caustics. I believe that it's ok to have the light in the can which will be generating a lot of caustics, so long as those caustics aren't really trying to light the scene (they're just being used to light the interior of the can...they'll of course light more than that, but my hope is since the IES should be providing the bulk of the light, it will be ok in terms of render speed/noise).

-Brodie

I know it is inadvisable to have scene with strongly powered emitters and weak emitters as it will lead to extra noise -- but I'm not sure where that line between strong and weak is.

Best,
Jason.

I think I'll be ok on that front. I'll be leaving the IES alone to try and get realistic lighting levels. For the interior light, I think I'll be using a 60watt incandescent and probably turning it down in ML.

Sorry about the noise, but here's a quick test...



-Brodie

Hey Brodie, what about just making the inside of the can a low powered MXI based emitter material to avoid the gap and moving the IES a bit further outside the lip (so it doesn't catch the edge).

I also seem to remember Tom posting a light where the emitter was placed in the back of the "can" and the inside of the "can" was set to a pure black diffuse material to avoid caustics but give the narrow beam focus.

Best,
Jason.

I may try the mxi thought. The only problem with that would be that it would only work with the light on, but that might be ok.

Thanks.

-brodie