Quote - Just a curious question, are you folks who are coding registered in the LuxRender forums and passing on what you find regarding the lights and fireflies and what not?

I'm registered, but I'm absolutely not going to start bothering the Lux developers. Before I believe that Lux is broken, I'm going to assume I'm doing something wrong.

I don't want those guys to get a bad taste in their mouths from us pestering them for support when there's a real possibility that LuxPose isn't doing sensible things with light levels or materials.

For example: we all know that diffuse reflection should be less than 1. But how much less? I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I have some assumptions I need to verify.

For example, suppose you have a spotlight with an intensity of exactly 1 (1 what? I don't know).

Now common advice says that the diffuse component should be at most around .8. So what does that mean? It says that whatever spot you're looking at will be .8 times the luminance of the light.

But think about that. If you render this object from some viewpoint, you see roughly 80% of the light luminance coming from the object. 80% of the light is bouncing towards this camera position. Now move the camera and render again. Here, too, 80% of the light is bouncing towards this new camera position. How can this be? If 80% went to the old position and 80% is also going to the new position, then 160% of the light is going to these two positions collectively. That's impossible, right?

In fact, if you mounted a thousand cameras in a hemisphere around this object, you'd find that all of them are getting 80% of the light. What does that actually mean?

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)