[Cosmasad]

Hey friends,

We have a question about p. 14 of the Rhino plugin manual where it says under "How do I group Emitter objects for Multilight-- "Compensate the power of the Emitter material in question for the fact that it will now need to cover all of the meshes that have just been joined."

If we have a 40 watt material emitter assigned to 100 lights (mesh objects) -- it seems like we should increase the power to 4,000 watts (40x100). Is this right?

Thanks.

Cosmas Demetriou

[JDHill]

Ah, please disregard that FAQ item; it is a holdover from Maxwell 1.x when multilight worked differently. It used to be that you would need to extract meshes from your NURBS emitter geometry, then join the meshes all together into one, then assign a single emitter material to that, if you wanted to get all of the lights controlled by a single slider in multilight. In version 2, the operation was changed to be material-centric, rather than object-centric, so doing that is no longer necessary -- now you get one multilight slider per emitter material.

As to your other question, no, I do not believe so. A quick test shows me that each object using an emitter material gets its own 'copy' of the emitter, so 100 lights all assigned the same 40W emitter will output a total of 4000W in the scene.