Emitter

Create a glowing object such as a LED light or a neon sign. You can create a standard emitter, or a physically accurate emitter using an IES file.

Turn on the Materials display mode, so you can see the changes as they are applied.

Click an object.

Note: Ensure the object is clear of materials before you apply an Emitter Light.
On the ribbon, click the Rendering tab.
Click the Materials icon.
Click Emitter.
For Presets, select one of the following options:
- Standard: Create a standard emitter.
- IES: Create a physically accurate emitter using an IES file. An IES file is a digital profile of an existing light.
Define the corresponding parameters.
Right-click and mouse through the check mark to exit, or double-right-click.

Standard Emitter

The following are the parameters for a standard emitter.

Main Parameters

Color

Select a color.
Select an image. The image overrides the color.
To blend the color with the image, click the plus symbol (+). You can tell if the blend option is turned on by looking at the image preview.

Power Unit

Define the intensity of the light. The default value is 100 watts.

Power

Define the intensity of the light source.

Efficacy

Define the luminosity of the light. You can look online for the efficacy of a specific type of light. For example, see the following Wikipedia page: Luminous efficacy.

Note: This option is only available if the Power Unit is watts or W/sr.

Caustics

Select Caustics to achieve a more accurate visualization of refraction and reflection. For example, you can use this option to render the shimmering waves of light at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Note: This feature is not currently available in GPU+CPU mode.

Passive Emitter

A passive emitter doesn't illuminate the scene, but you can still see if it there is no other light source in the scene.

Invert Light Direction

If your object is a closed solid, click Invert Light Direction to turn the light on or off.

Advanced Parameters

Displacement

Bump allows you to render detailed textures relatively quickly; however, because you are only changing the surface normals and not the surface itself, silhouettes and shadows might not be rendered realistically. This condition is particularly true for larger texture effects. If you need to give surfaces a greater sense of depth and detail, showing self-occlusion, self-shadowing, and silhouettes, use Displacement. Like bump maps, displacement maps are grayscale; black equals zero displacement and white equals maximum displacement (a value you define using the Height parameter below).

This feature is not currently available in GPU+CPU mode.

The default number of samples is 500.

Subdivision: Modify the object's number of subdivisions before displacement occurs. Higher values produce more accurate results.

Texture: Upload a texture map. Colored images will be mapped as grayscale.

Height: Set the maximum distance displaced. For displacement to appear, values must be greater than zero; the default is 2 cm.

Center: Invert displacement. This feature is useful for positioning objects along a ground plane. For example, adding a displacement map to a carpet may make it look like it's floating. Reducing your center will bring it back down to the floor. Adding a displacement map to a floor may result in objects intersecting with the floor. In this case, you could increase the center to avoid intersection.

Normal Smoothing: Enabled by default, to render smoothly (continuous shading). Disable to render in a faceted way, which is useful for rendering very sharp, detailed displacements such as sharp corners.

Tight Bounds: Enabled by default. This feature lets Inspire Studio compute more precise bounding volumes for the displaced surface, leading to slightly better rendering times. Since this feature is performance-based, check your engine settings to enable your fastest processors.

Clipping

Make areas of the material transparent, using a grayscale texture map where black equals completely transparent and white equals completely opaque. This feature is useful for quickly creating perforated materials like a mesh, since you can skip modeling the holes by hand.

Texture: Upload a texture map. Colored images will be mapped as grayscale.

Threshold (%): Change how the texture map is interpreted. The default is 50, where 50% gray is interpreted as 50% transparent. To make a greater area of the texture transparent; increase the threshold; to make a greater area of the texture opaque, decrease the threshold. At 100, the entire texture is transparent; at 0, the entire texture is opaque.

Soft: Soften the contrast between completely transparent and completely opaque.

IES Emitter

The following are parameters for an IES emitter.

Main Parameters

Color

To define the color, choose from the following options:

Select a color.
Select an image. The image overrides the color.
To blend the color with the image, click the plus symbol (+). You can tell if the blend option is turned on by looking at the image preview.

To define the shade, enter a value of 0-100, where 100 is the true color and 0 is black.

IES File

Select an IES file. An IES file is a digital profile of a real world light.

Multiplier

Set a multiplier for the inserted IES file. The default value is 1.

Caustics

Select Caustics to achieve a more accurate visualization of refraction and reflection. For example, you can use this option to render the shimmering waves of light at the bottom of a swimming pool.

Note: This feature is not currently available in GPU+CPU mode.