Lighting and Rendering with 3ds Max

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Now let's take a look at a few ways inside of

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three Ds max that we can start to render our scenes.

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So rendering means taking all the lighting information,

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the materials and everything and creating a final image.

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There are several ways to do this inside of three Ds max.

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We just have our drone sitting on a gray plane here.

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So right now, the illumination that you see is the default lighting.

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We don't have any lights in our scene as you can see in the scene explorer.

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So let's go ahead and add a light.

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So before we do anything, let's go ahead and jump into our render setup,

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we can do that by going to rendering coming down to render setup, we can hit F 10,

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we can also hit this little button right here

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and that will bring up our render setup.

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Now under render,

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this is where we'll be able to set the

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actual rendering method that we're gonna be using.

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Let's start by using the regular scan line render.

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So with this selected,

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you can see there is a common tab with some settings here that we can change,

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we can change the size of our render.

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So if we wanted to render 6 40 by 4 80 we could change that.

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We could change our frame range.

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If you go into the actual render,

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there are some settings specific to the actual render that we're using,

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we'll go ahead and leave this on scan line for

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now and we'll come back to this in a second.

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Now, let's add a light to our scene. So let's go ahead and go to create

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in the create panel and let's go over to lights.

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And for this one, I'm gonna choose some standard lights,

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there are three different sections here.

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I'm gonna just use the standard light for. Now,

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let's go ahead and add an omni

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light

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and I'm just gonna click

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in here

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and I'm going to move this up above the plane

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and then I'm going to come into the viewport

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and under lighting and shadows.

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I'm gonna change this to eliminate with seeing lights.

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Now, bring this over and you can kind of see the shadow moving here.

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Now, this is really, really blown out.

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So let's go ahead

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and now render this out with this one light and see what it looks like.

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So we can render by doing one of several different

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things we can go to rendering and just hit render

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shift Q shift F nine.

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We can also come in here, bring up our render window

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or we can hit this render production

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that's gonna bring up our render window and a little progress bar here

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and there, we can see our render which looks very similar to our viewport.

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Now, obviously, the light is too blown out.

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So I'm gonna take the Omni light,

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we'll go into modify and we can change some of the settings.

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Let's come down to the intensity

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and let's set our multiplier down to

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something like 0.5.

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Let's do a render.

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So that's looking a little bit better, very stark shadows, very stark lighting.

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We only have one light

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and it's this Omni light which projects from everywhere.

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Let's go ahead and select our omni light.

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I wanna move it up a bit

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and let's take our multiplier down a little bit more

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with that. Omni light dialed way down. We're still getting a very direct light.

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So what we wanna do is create some overall environmental light.

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And one of the ways we can do that is to create a skylight.

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So

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we'll go ahead and go to create standard lights

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and let's choose the skylight.

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We'll drop it into our scene.

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Let's change our multiplier down to one

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and you can see right now it's just using a white color. What we wanna do is use a map.

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So let's go in

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to our material map browser and I'm just going to type in H D R I

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and there are some environments inside of three Ds Macs that we can use.

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I'm gonna go and choose this

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Kiara one Dawn

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and I'm gonna change the multiplier and

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let's take the multiplier down to something like

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and let's do a quick render.

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So there you can see a render and now we're starting to introduce

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some magenta coming in from the map that we're using as the skylight.

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But you can see we are getting a little bit more light down here in

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some of the dark areas making it look just a little bit more realistic.

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Now, within this render window, you can re render from the actual window.

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You can choose the area that you want to render. You can change your preset.

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You can also decide to only view a specific channel

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by clicking on the buttons and you can save individual images out from this window.

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Now let's go ahead and get rid of our lights

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and we'll look at a different

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type of render.

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So let's go back into our render setup.

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In this time, we're going to change from scan line render to art render.

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This is Autodesk ray tracer.

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This is gonna be a great easy

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to use render if you're you're doing something

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like architectural visualization or something like that.

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So we'll go ahead and switch that to art

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and you can see here that the tabs change.

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So now we've got common but then we also have art render and you

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can change the render quality just really

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easily instead of having a bunch of different

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uh things that you have to change, it's really just a quality setting.

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And so right now we're at draft,

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we'll go ahead and leave it at draft until you know you get what

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you want and then you bump it up because obviously the higher the quality,

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the longer your render is going to take.

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So now let's add a light

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and for this, we're gonna go from standard to photo metric.

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You can see there are a few lights here, there's a sun that we can add target light.

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Let's add a free light.

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I'll go ahead and add it to Rocio. I'm just gonna move it up

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above. So let me grab it

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and I'm gonna move it a little bit further up.

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So something like that

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let's go into modify

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and you can see we have the free light properties that we can change.

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And you can see because this is a photo metric light. When we come down to intensity,

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you can see there's a dropdown for actual real lights. So

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if there's a specific kind of light that you're trying to create,

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you can change the setting to that particular light.

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For instance, we have fluorescent lights, we have halogen lights and so forth.

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And so you can choose the actual kind of life that you

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want change the intensity and it's all based around real values.

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Let's go ahead and do a quick render

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as is

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so that you can see the old Grannis

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is coming from that draft quality that we talked about in the render settings.

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And also it's a little bit too bright, I think.

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And so we can come in and change the intensity.

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Let's go ahead and just change this down to

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I'll go ahead and render that.

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So that's a lot less blow out. Now, let's fix the graininess.

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We'll come into our render setup

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and I'm just gonna dial this up from draft

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up to high

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and we'll go ahead and render again.

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This one is gonna take a little bit longer than the first one.

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So there you can see we've gotten rid of a little bit of the graininess there.

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If we dial this up even further,

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we can continue to refine the look that we have.

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And there you can see hopefully that it looks a lot smoother.

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And if you don't like the warmness that you're getting from the halogen light,

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you can always change that to another light type as well.