Choosing 3ds max viewport shading modes If the viewport is in the default shading mode then you can choose some shading options from this menu here and it says standard by default. Click on that and we can switch over to, for example, performance mode, which as the name indicates, is for high-performance applications. In other words, if you've got a very heavy scene and you're having trouble navigating, switch over to performance mode and you'll lose your shading and lighting but you'll be able to navigate more quickly. From this menu we can also choose the high-quality mode and that'll take a moment to load actually and I found that the high-quality mode is actually not very reliable and in this case I can see that the exposure's all wrong so I don't actually use the high-quality mode. What I do is I use the standard mode and turn on lights and shadows, so let's do that. Now go back to standard mode and from that menu, lighting and shadows, I can choose to illuminate with scene lights and I've got all these photometric tube lights up in the ceiling and now I've got a nice lighting affect in our viewport and it is interactive. We can also enable shadows from this menu once again that now reads user defined, go in there to lighting and shadows, and enable shadows and we even have a screen-space ambient occlusion effect in here if we want that.
