Lighting and Rendering Tutorials

The tutorials in this section relate to different lighting and rendering features that let you produce outstanding images and animations with 3ds Max. You will learn how to use a variety of lighting methods, how to render still images and animation, and how to use three powerful features in mental ray for achieving global illumination.

Files for This Section

All the files necessary for this tutorial are provided on the program disc in the \tutorials directory. Before starting the tutorials, copy the \tutorials folder from the disc to your local program installation.

Tutorials in this Section

Introduction to Lighting

Introduction to Rendering

Introduction to Lighting

Lights are objects that simulate real lights such as household or office lamps, the light instruments used in stage and film work, and the sun itself. Adding lights to a scene can help give it a more realistic appearance. If a scene contains geometry but no light objects, 3ds Max provides default lighting. But as soon as you add a light object to the scene, the default lighting is turned off. Setting up lighting is not difficult, but in order to do it well you need to plan ahead and experiment.

How you set up lights for a scene, depends on the purpose of your rendering or animation. Lighting situations fall into two broad categories:

• Lighting a space; for example, an architectural model.
  Lighting an outdoor daylight scene is a special case of this, because 3ds Max has special features for daylight.
  
  

  
  

  Lighting an interior space
• Lighting a specific subject; for example, a talking head.
  Whether the subject is a character, a still life, or other detail, the principles of lighting are much the same.
  
  

  
  

  Lighting a subject

Skill level: Beginner

Time to complete: 30 minutes

Tutorial Files

Note: All the files necessary to do the tutorials can be found on the program disc. Before doing the tutorials, copy the \tutorials directory from the disc to your local program installation.

In This Section

• Lighting an Interior Space
• Lighting a Close-Up of a Head
• Managing Multiple Lights
• Choosing a Shadow Type

Introduction to Rendering

To view the final results of your work in 3ds Max as a two-dimensional image or movie, you render the scene. By default, when you render, the software produces a still image at a specific resolution using the default scanline renderer, and displays it in a separate window on the screen. But a wide variety of rendering alternatives is available, and this tutorial will introduce you to some of them.

Skill level: Basic

Time to complete: 2 hours.

Features Covered in This Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

• Render a still image to the screen and to a disk file in different formats and resolutions
• Use different renderers and presets.
• Render a high-resolution image using multiple computers.
• Render an animation and combine still images into a movie file.
• Use a network farm to simultaneously render different images from an animation.
• Use rendering to create textures for use in games.

Tutorial Files

Note: All the files necessary to do the tutorials can be found on the program disc. Before doing the tutorials, copy the \tutorials directory from the disc to your local program installation.

Lessons in This Tutorial

Rendering Still Images

Rendering an Animation

Creating an Animated Shadow Study