David wrote:
anic2954:
The ArchiCAD Surfaces do not act as light sources, you need to use the Lamp Tool for a light source in renderings (in addition to the Sun).
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David
That's not how lighting works with the Maxwell plugin (necessarily).
You can use light sources from the ArchiCAD library, but they have to have geometry and physical shape(i.e they can't be the general light sources meant for the Lightworks render engine).
The Maxwell plugin converts the light sources into lighting emitters in one of two ways.
If the light source has IES data, then it gets converted into a format that Maxwell can generate light using that IES data.
On the flip side if there's no IES data, then Maxwell converts the material typically used as the light bulb or glass bulb surface (normally named "Lamp" or "MyLamp" or "Glass Lamp" if you dig into the GDL information) into a Maxwell emitter surface that generates the light.
I tend to stay away from using ArchiCAD lights for lighting with the Maxwell plugin for a couple of reasons.
Maxwell does not like it when your lighting material is part of a multi-surface or multi-material object and typically it will generate an error informing you of this and fail to light (or even render at all).
Normally this doesn't happen with the ArchiCAD lights since I guess the plugin converter separates the geometries of the material during conversion, but for light objects which aren't from the ArchiCAD library and which it may not convert, I imagine it might result in a error of not producing light (because of the reason mention above) and also not giving you a warning that it encountered that material (for whatever bug-related reason).
The second reason would be due to the fact that a lot of light objects and lamps in the library have a lot of complex or heavy geometry given the level of detail, especially in the part that ostensibly produces the light (the bulb) which will typically either have a lot of curves or lots of polygons.
Now technically this shouldn't be a problem since Maxwell is effectively a brute force renderer that will eventually converge to the correct solution, but practically it means that you would have to render for a very very very long time for most of these kinds of light sources for it to solve all the pathways of those emitter triangles before you begin to see it lighting the scene.
It gets even worse if the light has to pass through an additional layer of refractive material (like another glass surface on top of the emitter geometry.
The best (read: fastest) way of lighting scenes when not using daylighting or IBL in Maxwell is using the method he suggested, i.e create a simple geometric object (with one main surface at most, or a flat object like a simple small slab or wall) to which you assign an emitter material that you can then control the brightness of directly from the Material panel (which you can't do with the Light objects of library lamps).
I think the problem that the original poster might have been running into was assigning the emitter material onto only one face or surface of the emitter geometry (which, in the case of a simple rectangular slab or wall actually has 5 other faces) leaving the other faces with other materials which then makes it a multi-material or multi-surface lamp - which as I've mentioned is a no-no in lighting objects.
Although, it's strange that it didn't give any warnings if this is what you did.
So you have to assign the emitter material to the entire object (all faces) so that it has a single material all over.
Either that or you have to check or play around with your emitter material settings as the brightness or incandescence might be too low.
I hope one of these options helps.
