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I've three emissive mesh planes in my scene which I'd like to convert to Area lamps.

I've set my new Area lamps to use precisely the same size, location and strength as the planes were. But when I press shift+Z to preview the render, lighting is much, much darker than it was with the planes.

Is it just matter of me bumping up those Area lamp strengths, or is there something more to consider, if my goal is to get identical lighting what I had before with the planes?

Also is there some kind of formula I should use to convert emissive plane strength to Area lamp strength, or should I just eyeball it?

G. Ishikawa
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  • I'm totally not an specialist in this matter but from what you can read from Blender docs: Area lamps emit light from a square or rectangular area with a Lambertian distribution. Then do some reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambert%27s_cosine_law and you will know it's not only a matter of strength. I've done some testing with both setups and I can't find proper ratio. Even if it's really close, there are some differences. – cgslav Jul 02 '17 at 14:20
  • Related: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/14562/how-to-get-consistent-lamp-strengths-in-cycles also: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/8039/area-light-vs-emissive-polygon – cgslav Jul 02 '17 at 14:30

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Yeah that was a problem I had, I did some testing and found that its something like 15 to 1 ratio. If I had a Plane with the emission strength 1 then I needed strength 15 for the lamp.

Josip Kladarić
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    Interesting. During my testing I found the ratio being something like 200 to 1. So if my mesh used strength 20, I had to set the Area lamp to 4000. What could cause such difference in our ratios? – G. Ishikawa Jul 02 '17 at 12:40