Rectangular light acting up

I haven't found a good/consistent/easy way to show channel lighting yet... it's one of the things I wish they would throw some resources towards.

Did you tried an emissive material?

Also, a workaround could be to create a faked ceiling light texture and use an emissive material for the complete ceiling. I did this for an airplane interior test and it was working in this case.

Quote from benjaminriendeau

Even the emissive material Maxed out would not reflect enough light.

There is a trick to get more emissive power. Disable or hide all lights a and turn down the ambient intensity. Now turn up the camera brightness slider. So, you can get much more power to the emissive lights. Disadvantage - it maybe that you can't enough turn down the intensity of low emitters like TFT screens (for example at Rhino, where you can't set small intensities like 0.1). Now you can adjust all other kind of lights again.

An other disadvantage of lighting by emitters is, if your emitter isn't direct visible the lighting effect can disappear. So, I would try to create a textured emitter setup of the complete ceiling plus a cloud of lights. And I hope the developer try to find a solution for the future.

Quote from Micha

if your emitter isn't direct visible the lighting effect can disappear.

In most channel lighting this is the case. Rectangular lights are a pain to position and scale, Tube lights are the same and obscure most of the geometry you are trying to light (and light up the ends more than they should)... and they both show as bright lines in reflections.

I even tried a gradated emissive texture on the adjacent surface to emulate the bounce light, but you then have to balance the sunlight too.

Unfortunately the lighting effects depends on the distance also. If you are far away than emissive lights disappear too. Since channel lights are so important for interior design I hope the Enscape team find a solution. Maybe a keyword could help here.