That was a big help. I sort of have it working in Maya based on your scene and description... The IES is definitely projecting now with the spherical projection. It's also respecting the source plane's position. However, the rotation is ignored. I tried adding an input transform on the spherical ...

That's perfect, that really helped me understand. I'm not clear on why exactly we can't plug in a multiply as the rgbspectrumtexture is similar in that it has three values you define, RGB, but I guess I just have more to learn. This should do exactly what I need for the time being! More study later ...

Is there another forum that might attract more people familiar with this topic? To some degree id just like to make a spotlight and it seems like IES lights are the main way to do this. I don't think I can use standard maya lights.

Thanks for any insight!

Maybe a different way to ask this question. Why are most octane node outputs only a single coloe output rather than the traditional maya output where you have the single color output along with its sub R G B components? I'd imagine it's due to the complexities of outputting from Maya to Octane ...

I realize there's a textureColorCorrect node or something like that, but that just has HSV type controls. Usually in Hypershade with other renderers I just pipe the output (RGB) of the texture to the RGB input of a multiply node. Octane doesn't seem to typically want to operate with nodes like ...

Apologies if this is documented somewhere but I haven't been able to find a clear explanation of how IES files plug into Octane. I tried using an OctaneTextureEmission plugged into an octane diffuse shader but wasn't clear on if it was working. The documentation seems to imply that I need to add a ...

ok, I think I have a good solution. Exposing up the camera did help, but even it had a limit of 4096 which wasn't enough. I ended up plugging in a multi node into the light's power input, bypassing the artificial UI limitation and now have a sufficiently powerful light, even with the exposure set to ...

augment, by exposing up the camera? I suppose that's worth a shot, will that cause octane to do more samples ronaccomedate the brighter illumination? I have the parameter at 1.0 as you say, but still dim.

Odd behavior. Things as bright as sun always being clamped seems like an odd limitation. Back ...

this really has me stumped. The lights have a plausible natural attenuation, but they seem severely limited with that arbitrary built in cap. For a small scene I suppose you won't run into this problem very often, but if you need a very bright light I can't seem to figure out how to get more energy ...

I've started blocking out a scene and when I determined the octaneSunSky might not be my best option, I figured I'd try adding an image/texture for the background (for the general sky look, like clouds and then I wanted to add a bright sun as a separate octane light. I tried cranking the light to a ...