2 Questions here on lights.

1-I am making a room and using a material to represent a dropped ceiling.  All looks well.  I want to create the look of a fluorescent 2’x4’ panel up there.  Is there any way to draw a plane, box or any sort of geometry and then convert that to a light source?  Ideally my thought was to draw a 2’x4’ plane and have it emit light and that would work.  I am hoping there is some way to do that.

2-On a similar note I am making a box, it is a display case.  This is already thought out and they just want to see a picture of it.  The object in the display case is going to be up lit with a row of LED’s, kinda like a rope light type of thing.  One thought is to make a small spotlight and array it to create what I want.  The problem is the drawing is going to have lots of these display cases and all the lights eat up memory when I start to render.  My question is if there is another way of creating a line light or striplight type of thing that is only one source in the drawing.  It would be similar to if you were wanting to make neon.

Thoughts?

Matt

Look in the Lighting and Rendering forum for this kind of question.
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To actually address your questions: if you are using Mental Ray with Final Gather, you should investigate the self illumination feature of the Arch.&Design material.  If you check “Illuminate the scene” then it will actually do that, to some extent...search for several other posts in the forum about problems and limitations to this technique.  But it sounds ideal for your rope light!

--3ds Max Design 2009 64bit, Direct3D 9, Win Vista Premium 64, 3ghz quadcore Xeon, Quadro FX1700--