Tips on the use of emitters in Octane and the poser plugin Tweet

[wimvdb]

Some tips on how to use emitters in Octane. Newcomers and some others might find it helpful. Most of it comes from various other posts and videos on this forum, but I think it useful to put them all in one post.

Feel free to correct or add to this

The best emitters are single sided squares and make them larger as the default which the Create Emitter script produces for spotlights. If they are larger they can be controlled much easier.
Use IES lights in the distribution nodes and play with the scale to get the effect you want. The difference between 1.0 and 0.5 scale is quite significant in the distribution of light. After these changes you can adapt the power to suit your image.

The ball as difficult to control as an emitter. IES lights do not really work on them and the entire power is distributed in all directions – meaning you have to increase the power to get the same results as a single sided plane. If you have a single camera view, the square looks much better.

The bloom and glare post processing seem to work with emitters as well – even if no daylight gets through in an enclosed environment. This can create nice effects

If you have a textured object which should give light, consider adding an emitter. Set the object to textured emission, but set the power very low (below 1) and then set the emitter (as blackbody) to emit the actual light. Use the overall colour of the object as a guideline to set the temperature to influence the colour. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature has a nice chart to get the right colour

IES distribution maps are very useful. They work best with single sided planes facing downwards. If you want to have it faced upward, you have to change the orientation 180 degrees (or rotate the plane in Poser).
Some good starter lights are here http://www.mrcad.com/download-free-ies-lights/. It is a set of 30 lights with a nice preview to show the distribution of each light.

[pfrancke]

thank you very much for posting such as these.