Bolometric light curves obtained with cmfgen for models r1w1, r1w4, r1w1h, r1w5h, r1w5r, r1w6, and r2w1. The time origin corresponds to shock breakout. The cmfgen models are computed by adopting the radius, velocity, density, and gas temperature from the heracles simulations at each epoch. The luminosity offset between the heracles and cmfgen simulations is about 10–20%, and the resulting light curves are very similar (compare with Fig. 6). There is a conceptual difference between the two codes since heracles takes explicit account of time dependence, while cmfgen computes the spectrum in steady state but adopting the time-dependent structure from heracles. heracles treats the gas in LTE while cmfgen uses a non-LTE approach.