Wow, awesome results!
Great! Are the yellow lights on the wall done via emissive surfaces or an area light? It looks very nice!
It’s emissive surface
Out of curiosity: do they work differently? (I know they are applied differently, but do they produce different results? Are there different mechanisms in the background rendering process?)
I have always just used emissive surfaces because it’s quicker and can be edited without having to go into the enscape object editor.
Yes there is a big difference.
| Emissive | Artificial light | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Arbitrary shape (Every possible surface) | Restricted to certain shapes (Point, sphere, rectangle, …) |
| Light | Potentially noisy, especially if powerful and small | Almost noise free |
| Shadows | Very blurry | Sharper |
| Bounce light | Needs one indirect bounce to be visible at all | Directly visible Therefore in total one indirect bounce more than emissive |
TL;DR: Use artificial lights whenever possible for smaller light sources. Use emissive for quite large emitting surfaces (TV screens or large lighting panels like in the above project).