"Correct" way create emissive/lit meshes?

I read somewhere that lights should be set up using light actors instead of emissive surfaces. But in my case, some of my lights are just plain lightbulbs, some are tube lights, and some are giant lit displays, all of which have some texture behind them. Should I stick with emissive surfaces, or should I do something else?

I don’t care about performance - it’s not a game and all the output will be pre-rendered.

Now with lumen, emissive surfaces light the environment.

If that emission is enough for your purposes, then that’s fine. But if you actually want to impersonate a light source, then you can also include a light.

Some useful options are

image

on the mesh level. It will act as a light even when the camera is further away. And

image

Turn this off if you don’t want the emissive to affect the environment.

What do you mean when you say “impersonate a light source”?

I’m considering baking the lighting instead of using Lumen, since I don’t need to render anything in real-time, anyway.

If you want to make a street lamp, for example. If you use a default emissive material for the bulb section, it will throw unwanted light back on the stand, not what real lamps do.

So you can stop it doing that, and put a real light source in the lamp ( a point light or rect ).