3ds max Lighting Assigning a diffuse material

3ds max Lighting Assigning a diffuse material click on the button labeled assign material to selection. And now that assignment's been made, we can close the material editor, also close the scene explorer, de-select all of the objects, give focus to the perspective view, and do another active shade render. And now we have a diffuse neutral gray material assigned to all the objects, which is appropriate for setting up our lighting tests. That's how to assign a diffuse material to the objects in a scene in preparation for lighting.

3ds max Lighting Previewing renders with ActiveShade

3ds max Lighting Previewing renders with ActiveShade The default mode is production rendering mode and that means we're going to render final output to disk or to the screen noninteractively. What we want is active shade mode which is interactive. From that target pull down list choose active shade mode then we'll need to choose the renderer. We'll talk about this more in the chapter on rendering but there are three active shade renderings available. If we click on the renderer pull down ART is for compatibility with other Autodesk applications. The Scanline renderer is the legacy renderer for very simple old school renderings. The Arnold renderer is currently the most advanced, global, illumination renderer available in the stock installation of 3ds Max. Choose Arnold from the renderer pull down and now active shade mode will use the Arnold renderer. Then in the common tab, we just want to set the resolution. 

3ds max Lighting Previewing renders with ActiveShade Currently we've got the default resolution of 640 by 480. I want a 16 by nine aspect and previously in the course I created a preset here for a 640 by 360 you can click on that if you have it or you can just type in the value of three hundred and sixty in the height field there. Alright, so 640 by 360 is the preview resolution for the active shade window. Now we can set up our options for the render itself. Let's go to the system tab, this is where we can set up the processing options for Arnold and we can control this so that we have a little bit of processing overhead available for other operations in 3ds Max and to do that I want to disable the option labeled Auto detect threads, turn that off and then I can manually set the number of threads or cores that Arnold will use to render in the Activeshade mode. You should know how many cores you have or specifically how many virtual cores you have on your Windows computer

Offsetting the image with Lens Shift - 3ds max Camera Techniques

Offsetting the image with Lens Shift - 3ds max Camera Techniques  The best way to approach this, I think, is to have no tilt to the camera. So we can set the rotation value for the Y axis here to 90 degrees, so it has no tilt and then with that camera selected, go into the Modify panel, scroll down to the bottom, and you'll see Perspective Control. And we have Lens Shift horizontal and vertical. If I want to see more of the ceiling then I can just change this vertical percentage value. I just drag that down, give it a negative value, and I'm shifting the view upward in two dimensions. So now we're seeing the top of the ceiling here, but we're still in a two point perspective.

 The vertical lines are still parallel. Alright, I can set that back to zero. So that's for moving the horizon line up or down. We can also shift left and right with a horizontal offset and that's not really that applicable in this situation, but it does come in handy in certain cases, like for example if you're orbiting the camera around its target, you can use this horizontal offset to move the target in screen space and shift it left and right. 'Kay, I'll set that horizontal back to zero. There's also Tilt Correction. I don't tend to use that myself, but it's there if you want it.

Setting rotation axis order - 3ds max Camera Techniques

Setting rotation axis order - 3ds max Camera Techniques Then the y axis, which is the green one has a child which is the x axis. So it follows when I rotate in y the x axis follows. But the z axis does not follow because it's the parent. So it's not going to inherit from it's child. Alright, then we rotate around x, nothing follows x because x is the ultimate child in this hierarchy. Okay, so I'm going to restore everything back to zero. Just type in zero's for x, y, and z. And now my camera is facing straight down and I'm going to change the axis order or the order of priority. What I want to have happen is that the line of sight axis or the z axis should be the least important one and the one that does not transmit any information to the other axis, in other words I want it to be the child to the priority I want is I want the pan axis to be the most important. The tilt axis, less important, and the dutch tilt axis least important. To change the axis orders select the object and go up to the motion panel. We haven't seen this one yet in this course. It looks like a little moving sphere or wheel. Click on motion and then down here we have p, r, s parameters, position rotation scale. Click on the button labeled rotation to get at the rotation parameters.

3ds max Lighting Using the Light Explorer

3ds max Lighting Using the Light Explorer And click okay. And now all the lights are actually working in this view port. Okay, let's take a look at the light explorer. It's found under Tools, All Global Explorers, Light Explorer and I'm going to make this wider, just change the side of this because it's too narrow to see all of the fun things that are found in here. Especially this light intensity. I want to adjust that a lot. So I'm going to move that column over to the left, just click and drag and move it over there. 

3ds max Lighting Using the Light Explorer And then I can resize the window so it's not taking up too much space on the screen. And these are the most important properties, the name of the light, its object color, visibility, and its light status, whether it's on or off and then its intensity. Now these are all instances, so if I turn one of them off flicking this light on switch, then they all turn off. Turn that back on again. Likewise with the intensity, if I change one, they will all change. And this is said to have physically accurate value of 240 candelas. The light intensity here is listed in candelas.

3ds max Lighting Illuminating a scene with the environment

3ds max Lighting Illuminating a scene with the environment . And that's up here at the top. And we have Common Parameters, Background, Color, or Environment Map. And the Environment Map is where we would put a bitmap image, or maybe a physical sun and sky environment. We can also just give it a background color. And in Arnold, that will actually emit light into the scene. Click on the color swatch, and increase the value, and immediately we see we're getting a very intense light coming through the windows. And it looks blueish, because, again, this is defaulted to a 65k, or 6500 Kelvin degrees Color Temperature. But we are shooting it through a camera sensor that's set to a warmer color of 5000 degrees Kelvin making this white light coming through the windows appear more blueish. And we want to have a little bit less illumination coming through just enough to make it look like it's overexposed. So in this case, maybe a value of 12 or so

3ds max Lighting Illuminating a scene with the environment  If we want it to look like there's more light coming, of course we could crank it up, let's give it a value of 15. And click Ok. And that's very simple, we've just added environmental lighting. And what that did, is behind the scenes, it converted that into an Arnold sky dome light. But again, if you want to learn more about that, check out my other course, 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold. That's how to setup a basic environment color, in order to provide background illumination.

3ds max Lighting Creating a sun and sky

3ds max Lighting Creating a sun and sky  Click and drag on the Azimuth and observe the results in all the views as well as the ActiveShade window, and I can give that an Azimuth value of not nearly 300. I'll bring that around to maybe 320 or so, and I've got a little spill of light there. Then we can bring the Altitude down. Click and drag that value, and we're lowering the sun in the sky 'til it gets very close to the horizon, and if we're lucky we can actually see it through the window here. There it is. So I'll give the Azimuth a little bit higher value. Let's make that 330, and now I can see the sun there. So we can change the exposure value in the Global Exposure value here if you bring that up to a value of 16, and we can see the sun a little bit better there. Notice by the way that I have Use Physical Camera Controls if Available turned off so that all cameras in this scene will obey these exposure values. Alright, so that's how to do a manual sun position. 

Let's also do it by date, time, and location. Select Date, Time, and Location in the Date and Time Mode, and then choose a location on Earth, and it's currently San Francisco, California. Click on that button, and I'm going to choose Portland, Oregon. Just click on the map somewhere, and I've got North America, but of course I can choose different areas. We've got Portland, Oregon here. It pops right up, so I'll click OK. I'll set the Date and Time. The Day is going to be the first of the month. The Month is May or the fifth month of the Year 2018, and the Date and Time, I'll increase the hour, so as I increase this up past 15, we start to see a splash of light in the office there. At 1800 hours we're getting good side illumination. Then we can change up our Exposure Value. Let's set that to 13. Now that's exposed pretty well. We can scroll down a little bit into the parameters for the Physical Camera Exposure Control and just change up this contrast curve