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3ds max 5 has new Advanced Lighting features such as the Light Tracer. In this exercise, you’ll use a Skylight and Light Tracer to add realism to an outdoor scene. This is an intermediate level tutorial. You should be familiar with standard lights and shadows in 3ds max before doing this exercise.

1. Download the file harnessing_12.3.zip and unzip it. Open the file FountainNew.max in 3ds max 5. Currently, there is no lighting in the scene.

2. To keep render times reasonable, render the following exercise at 320 x 240. Render the camera view. It appears flat and uninteresting.

3. Create a Target Direct light in the Top viewport. Position the light so it is shining down on the scene from the left, as shown in the following.

Figure 12-13: Create and position a Direct light

4. Enable Ray Traced Shadows for the Direct light. Turn on the Overshoot option. Increase the Falloff parameter to enclose the entire scene, so the shadows will appear everywhere.

Figure 12-14: Increase the Falloff parameter to enclose the scene

5. Re-render the scene. The Direct light alone gives a poor approximation of sunlight.

Figure 12-15: Scene rendered with a single Direct light only

6. Turn off the Direct light. Create a Skylight off to the side of the scene geometry.

The location of the Skylight does not affect the rendering.

7. In the Main Menu, select Rendering > Advanced Lighting. In the Advanced Lighting dialog, select Light Tracer. Leave all of the settings at their defaults.

8. Re-render the scene. Enabling Advanced Lighting results in much longer rendering time.

Figure 12-16: Scene rendered with a single Skylight only

It looks like a completely overcast day, because there are no hard shadows. Also, there are no specular highlights on the water materials for the fountain, and this does not look right.

Now you will combine the Direct light with the Skylight to achieve the effect of a sunny day with realistic ambience.

9. Reduce the Multiplier value of the Skylight to 0.5.

The combined illuminance of a Direct light and the Skylight at full intensities would wash out the scene. You could use Exposure Control to correct this, but there is no need to do so in this case, and it would only increase render times unnecessarily.

10. Turn the Direct light back on, and re-render the scene.

Figure 12-17: Scene rendered with Direct light and Skylight

The scene looks much more convincing, because the Direct light renders shadows and specular highlights, and the Skylight renders realistic diffuse surfaces.

Finally, you will finish the job by enabling diffuse reflections.

11. In the Advanced Lighting dialog, increase the Bounces value to 1. Re-render the scene.