[Josephus Holt]

I'm slowly working the most obvious bugs out of this image and I need to tackle the hanging cylindrical lights (not my choice of design). I'm going to make the shafts narrower, but need some help with the fixtures. I'm trying to get some milky glass that would be translucent to show the emitter highlight inside, as well as let light pass through and illuminate the scene. I'm using a small cube inside for an emitter. Some thoughts on the fixture "glass" material as well as a recommend thickness of the "glass" material would be greatly appreciated.

(Not shown in this image, butI've already reworked the grey floor mat in the foreground)

[Fernando Tella]

You are gonna get a lot of noise illuminating through diffuse glass. Maybe painting a gradient (radial white-yellow), converting to mxi and using as emitter will make it faster.

[Josephus Holt]

Fernando...sorry, my ignorance showing up here. I made a gradient as suggested....can you help this dumb fellow with more specific steps to convert to mxi and use as emitter?

I tried making an emitter with a bsdf layer using the gradient map but it does not look like that will give off light.

Any help would be appreciated.

[caryjames]

Hi Josephus: JD helped me a lot with this over on the Rhino forum so if you do some searches in that forum you might find more info. Basically you

Start--- Maxwell Render
Click--- Load Image
Find where you saved your gradient
When the image loads you
Click--- Save as .mxi
Save it somewhere that you know you will find it

Then go back to your render and to load it into an emitter
Here is how...

Select your emitter
Click--- Load image emission texture
Scroll through to where you saved your .mxi and select your file
and Voila you are lighting your scene with an .mxi gradient texture

Hope that helps

[Josephus Holt]

Thx...good directions...easy to follow

Now to experiment till it looks right

[Fernando Tella]

Do as Caryjames says. In mxed you have to make an emitter layer instead of bsdf then in the input box select "Image Emission" and then your mxi texture there; in fact you can have both layers: emitter produces light and the rest shows when you turn light off or low in multilight.

[Josephus Holt]

Thx for the help to figure out how to use a gradient on the lights, unfortunately not much of an improvement from before.

They still look really flat to me and have no life. Since they are a focal point in the scene I'm going to have to do better than this.

Any suggestions to get more life in these tubular lights (I can't change the design but I can do what I want with the light quality).?

[formzizzle]

any tutorial or useful links that digs deeper into the topic of gradient lighting?
I'm a newb and very interested in knowing what this ,mxi does to the scene.

Thank you.

[Josephus Holt]

formzizzle...I would like to know too I know how to do them, but so far don't find the advantage...probably not doing it right

[Bubbaloo]

I'm not seeing any gradient on your light fixtures in the latest render. Can we see what your mxi looks like? (Convert it to jpg and upload).

[Josephus Holt]

I'm not seeing any gradient on your light fixtures in the latest render. Can we see what your mxi looks like? (Convert it to jpg and upload).

Brian, here you go. When I used this gradient image it washed out very quickly when trying to get enough light to emit.

[Carl007]

"Any suggestions to get more life in these tubular lights (I can't change the design but I can do what I want with the light quality).?"

Well, why don't you sweet them lights up in psd, or render a separate pass with only lights and some mxl post-work with simulens to get a nice and alive glow around the tubulars. It renders fast.

[Josephus Holt]

It looks like a PS manipulation would be the best way to go (I tried that and it worked better)...however, I find that I don't like the strong illumination dead center in the scene, so am going to make the fixtures chrome instead