That is a nice idea, however IMO you are best having the emitter geometry facing directly down, and not having it at an angle. If you have it at an angle you will get the emitter plane casting shadows on the emission, even if opacity is set to 0 (see the image below where there is a shadow from the emitter geometry on the right of the base plane). So in summary, have your emitter facing straight down, and set the rotation angle by the Spherical Projection Transform Rotation.I would love to have the option that the IES emitting direction could be connected to the normal vector of the geometry. This way I could bind my surface to the lamp geometry and if I alter the lamp orientation the light emitting directory would be changed accordingly... (please see pic no 2)
My understanding of this (and someone like Roeland or Abstrax would need to confirm) is that the intensity of the emitter is inversely proportional to the number of polygons in the Octane Mesh object. So non-live, non-block instance emitters are in the main geometry mesh object, which will have many polygons so the intensity will be reduced. Live or Block emitters have their own pin on the Octane Geometry Group node, so there is only the emitter geometry in that node, so the emission is higher. I suggest you search these forums - where I'm sure this has been discussed at some point, and the reasoning for it given.P.S. one thing I observed is that when either blocking an ies emitter plane or activating the "live update" option in the octane geometry tab, these objects seems be much brighter in contrast to their simply copies siblings, which cause an inhomogeneous appearance in a scene
Paul
