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Inverse square law should apply to the lights too. The lights may be bright and very hot but each meter away from them would mean a significant drop in the transmitted energy.



Inverse square applies to spherically projected energy. It was directed in this case.


No


Care to elaborate?

Focusing a light, while still leaving the falloff ""spherical"", makes it so the center of the sphere is not at the light source, it's a virtual point significantly behind it. With a narrow beam, being 1 meter from the light and 10 meters from the light might only be 2x different in brightness, or even less.

And for lights with significant width, you drift away from spherical falloff the closer you are and the wider they are. As you get quite close, and the light fills a lot of your field of view, you approach the situation of an infinite wall of light and that has linear falloff.

These lights are huge and wide and can have tight beam angles.


Oh, I accidentally undersold it, infinite wall of light has no falloff.

Infinite line of light has linear falloff.


Your explanation suffices! It's not a point source, but if we half here and there we can kinda pretend it is, for some reason.




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