I’m trying to set up a material using emission, but I can’t seem to get the light to reach far enough. Is there any way to boost the distance instead of the brightness of an emission material instead of having to ramp up the emission values to ridiculous amounts?
Energy distribution for Electromagnetic Fields is 1/r^2 in reality, and Cycles (which i presume your talking about, when saying Emission value, maybe mention that in future threads) does too, but you can cheat a little with the “Light Falloff”-Node, It has Outputs for Quadratic, Linear and Constant Light Falloff, increasing the Smooth Slider limits the Light Intensity at close range. Simply connect the output of the node to the Emission Shaders Strength input and you’ve got quite some control.
If you have to make your emission value that high, there is usually something wrong with your scene setup. Try rethinking if your light is at the correct position and has the right size. Since cycles is somewhat physically correct, there should be a logic explenation why a value should be high or low.
Thanks! The falloff is what I needed. It would be even more awesome if they had a falloff factor of some sort. Even though it might not be physically accurate, it would be nice for a temporary override. But for this particular case, it worked fine for my project.
@pcforme: Try simulating mixed lighting, i.e. outside sky world illuminating interior inside - which is also illuminated by a very tiny and incredibly strong camera flash (maybe also other interior lights). You need to set insane values for the flash, not to mention the noise produced by the gross area difference making this setup a nightmare to render.
Scale your scene smaller.
Under the Color menu there is a Light Falloff node.