[jfrancis]

(above is a photo from wikipedia)

Where do the various reds, oranges and yellows come from?

Should I just pick a color, say 1800 K, and let exposure and overexposure do all the rest of the work turning oranges into yellows?

When I soft-mask an orange emitter the gray zone in the mask just gives me a darker orange (brown) when I wish it gave me an altogether cooler Kelvin value (red).

Is there a way to map Kelvin to grayscale mask?

[Mihai]

You can have more than one emitter in a material, so you can map between them to make the various colors. The Kelvin temp picker should work well in this case.

[jfrancis]

Good idea.

[jfrancis]

What if I build all my color variation into a single 32-bit texture map and map it?

(I've not used that capability yet)

[rusteberg]

What if I build all my color variation into a single 32-bit texture map and map it?

that's what i would do. here's an image i pulled off the web and opened in maxwell then saved as mxi and used in the emitter slot.

[jfrancis]

sweet