Rendering with Arnold using 3ds Max

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Now, let's take a quick look at how we can use Arnold to render images inside of thus

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Max. And you can see we just have sort of a music room

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uh set up here to use to render

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and we don't have any lights in the scene right now.

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Let's first go into our render setup

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and make sure we have Arnold selected as our render

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and you can see that gives us an Arnold specific

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tab that has some Arnold specific parameters on it.

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We still have our common tab with the size and the frame numbers.

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So go ahead and set that to Arnold.

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And then the first thing I'm gonna do is add an environment light.

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And if we come into rendering and come down to your environment,

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I wanna make sure that there's no environment currently in our background.

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What we're gonna do is use an Arnold light to do this

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and Arnold lights work a little bit differently in terms of

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choosing what kind of light you want to actually use.

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Let's go to create,

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we're gonna go to lights

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and instead of photo metric or standard,

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we're gonna choose Arnold and you can see there's only one type of light.

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So click on Arnold light,

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add it to the scene

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and you can see it now here in our Explorer, as well as here in our viewport.

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And I'm gonna change the type

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from point to sky dome.

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And if you look at all of these, you can see you have a lot of different options.

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This is where you'll actually change the type of light that you want to use.

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You can create a spotlight, you can create a distant light,

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which is kind of like sunlight, which we'll do in a second, a

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point light we're gonna do is create a sky dome light.

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OK. So the sky dome selected, I wanna choose the format.

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I want to change that to lat long because that's the

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type of H D R image that we're gonna be using.

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Let's come down to color slash intensity. I'm gonna change this color to texture

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and this is where we're gonna put on our maps.

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So here we're gonna come back and I'm just gonna type in

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H G R I and we'll choose H D R environment and let's choose this Portland landing pad.

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You can use any of these really.

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So get our environment added

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depending on how you add this, your intensity may be a little bit high

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and your exposure

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may be high.

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So these may be one and eight something like that.

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You can see that there is an interplay between intensity and exposure.

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Now, instead of rendering this apart in a separate window,

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one of the cool things we can do is turn on active shade.

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So in our viewport, let's go ahead and turn on active shade using Arnold,

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you can see that's giving us a rendered preview of what this will look like.

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Actually in our view port,

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you can see it's really, really blown out.

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So what I wanna do is decrease either the intensity or the exposure.

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Let's go and take the exposure down by half.

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You can see it progressively get better and better.

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OK. I'm gonna take the intensity down by half as well.

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So I don't want any overall kind of large scale illumination.

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I want it to be pretty low,

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pretty low level of illumination here.

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So I think that looks pretty good. I might want to lower it uh a little bit more even.

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But the thing I want to do is actually add some direct

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sunlight coming in through the window at kind of an angle.

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So to do that, I'm going to create another Arnold light.

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So come up here, we've got Arnold light selected, we're in create,

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let's go ahead and create another Arnold light.

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This time, I'm going to change the type to distant

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and I'm gonna hit alt W to jump out of our perspective view.

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Let me turn off active shade for a moment

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and then I want to grab that light,

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move it up

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and kind of over this way.

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And we can see from the top view,

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it's pointed straight down.

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So what I wanna do is kind of point it in through the window

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and then sort of add an angle.

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Now this distant light is really just a light vector or direction.

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So I'm just positioning it for seeing clarity in organization.

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What really matters is how it's rotated.

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So we can in our perspective, you see this a little bit better,

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the angle that we're looking at.

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So I'll kind of move it over this way and

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it's kind of an interesting angle to get some

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cool shadows in here.

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Let's go ahead and go to modify

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and there, you can see some similar parameters.

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Let's go back into our shot cam

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and I'll just maximize that.

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Let's go ahead and turn on active shade again.

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Let's see what kind of difference the new light has made.

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So I can already tell that I want to really increase the intensity of that light.

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So let's choose that light

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and let's bring up our exposure. So we'll bring this back to

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higher exposure

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and now we're getting really some strong light in there

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can rotate it a little bit.

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I do like the, the brightness of it.

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Let's take this down a little bit though.

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So once we get kind of a feel of how it's going to look using active shade,

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we can go ahead and turn that off

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and now we can do a render.

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So let's go ahead and just do a production render and see how it looks.

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So then we can see if we need to adjust anything,

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so it looks pretty good, but you can definitely see some graininess in there.

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And so some of the things that we can do

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to kind of change that is if we go over to our Arnold render, you can see

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there is a sampling in ray depth

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and we've got this camera samples,

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those are sort of a multiplier of the samples that

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we have for diffuse specular transmission and so forth.

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So you can try increasing samples in the specific

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areas

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and you can also increase samples in your camera.

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I just added some sampling to the diffuse.

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Let's make actually make that five

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and we'll go ahead and hit render again.

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So to my eye that looks a little bit better.

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Having the samples a little bit higher, gives us a little bit

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uh more of a cleaner look in some of these brick areas uh where we had some of the noise,

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you could also play around with some of the sampling settings to get

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the result that you want.