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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.

This is my first tutorial, so it is simple, but I guess it will help on some people :). I will make a special glass using Max and for the renderer V-ray. Most of the people do glass by using lathe, my version is a little different. So here are the steps:

Create a line in front viewport that will be the profile of the glass:

Draw a circle in top view



Select the circle, go to the Modifiers list and select Bevel Profile, and on Pick Profile, select the first shape:



Convert this to an editable Poly select the top and delete



Go to Modifiers Panel and select Shell (is available only for Max 6 as I know), and adjust the thickness of the object how you like



Now to make the special for of the glass we need to cut a little of the top, using booleans. We will use a box like so:



And go to Compound Objects and use Booleans



The problem is that now we have some artifacts - the face there is not ok. Deleting the face or the edge has now worked.



So we will insert a vertex or two on that line and use Target weld to the opposite vertexes to correct this.



Same proble here:



Now all is ok. Select the edges and chamfer them twice, just a little. If you wish to make the bottom of the glass thicker just select the bottom of the glass and drag it down.



I have modified the shape of the glass by using the Taper tool from the Modifiers list.



First choose V-ray renderer. Not fancy rendering settings, just in the V-ray: Image Sampler(Antialising), turn of the Adaptive subdivision. For the glass materials use this settings:



and for the liquid this



For the lighting I have used an Omni light, V-ray shadows cheked and on V-ray shadows parameters check Transparent shadows and area shadow. Use a plane for the scene and assign a white color to this.



It looks fine, but not really :). The glass need something to reflect. To do this use a HDRI map. You can find some HDRI images at this address http://athens.ict.usc.edu/Probes/



and assign this to V-ray Environment



and the result





And with caustics the scene will look like this:

Go in the front view and select spline > line
Option corner, bezier and draw a spline similar to the one in the image. If you want you may download the spline already done. Below the spline in the image there’s the spline with the lathe modifier

Once you’ve finished with the spline go in to the modifier panel and select lathe and as parameters y and min.
check weld core and increase the number of segments to 20 (this is to have a smooth effect).
Then convert the shape into an editable poly.
Now we have to set up the pivot point. Go Hierachy > pivot > affect pivot only > center to object.
Once we have centered the object to work better with the construction of the shape it’s a good practice to center the object to the “world”.. i.e. your grid center point.
Click F12 on keyboard and set X, Y, and Z to 0.

Create a sphere with auto grid in the center of your piece. To be sure that your sphere is at the right point click again F12 and set X and Y to 0 (do not change Z value).



Now go in the front view. And select spline > line, draw a shape like in picture.



Once you’ve done, convert it into a editable poly select the front poligon extrude with an amount of 4,5



Select the red vertex in the image then x uniform scale.

Move down the two vertex at the bottom of your recent shape



Then, select the “mirror” tool, and y copy with offset value to 0



attach all the shapes and you’ve done