Environments, Rendering and Saving images

I am going to look at Environments and what you can do with them. The good thing about environments is that they can save you a lot of time, and complete your image. For example I am going to do a winter scenery.

I started off with creating three rectangles and turning them into haystacks using a material I found.

I edited them by selecting soft selection, and by moving the vertex.(blue dots)

I then selected Environments. You can ind this by selecting 8, or clicking on rendering on the top tool bar and then Environment. I then clicked on bitmap and selected the environment I wanted. When you have selected your image it will show you a preview.

The preview shows you what it will all look like once it has been rendered. As you can see the haystacks need to be moved much lower. After changing the position into the correct place my scenery now looked like this :

This is the rendered image. This is only a simple one to show how the environments work.

It would be very easy to make the haystacks look alot more realistic.

Rendering

Once your image has been completed, you must render it for the finished image. You can do this by selecting the Render button:

here there aqr emany setting syou can adjust such as the ray trace, output size and much more. Once you have edited the settings press the large Render button in the right bottom corner. The finished image then appears on a seperate screen.

My image has a black background as I set it to black. If you set an environment the rendered image will be on he environment. You can then save the imae easily by clicking on the top left corner button of a disk. You can then save the completed rendered image as whatever you wish.

Lighting

Automatically Max has default lights in the viewports which enable the user to see their models in a basically lit environment however you can add as many lights as you want for different affects.

To access the lighting panel go to the Create panel, and click on the small lighting symbol

I created a small scene, and clicked and dragged a few different objects on to it. I differed the objects so that you can see the different affects when using lighting.

I went to the create panel, and clicked on the small lighting symbol.

On the viewport I chose a target spot and placed a position for the light to be.

Target Spotlights are very useful for mood lighting, there are two types of spotlights, free target spotlights free target spots can be used when you want a small area to be lit. A good example of this would be for a cars headlamps, streetlamps etc.

Above I used directional lighting. This is good for creating shadows.

You can change the lighting in the parameters to Omli or Directional.

Omli light radiates light in all directions this is perfect if I were to need a lamp or a light above such as a simple light in a room. The light radiates from the one source. There are other lighting modes such as directional lights use a cone of illumination and the sides of the cone are parallel rather than radiating from a single source like spotlights. You can change the light to either an Omli light or Directional light easily.

I decided to create an empty room and see the difference with one room with the Omli light and another without.

Here is a room with normal lighting. There are two white walls and a cream carpet and a brown door.

I am now going to add an Omli lighting and see what differences it makes to the room and the colour in the room.

After selecting Omli lighting I positioned the light right in the middle of the room.

As you can see. There is a lot of difference between a plain room lit by 3Dmaxs default lighting and an Omli light. The Omli, makes the room look much whiter, and the floor look lighter. It looks much warmer and more realistic.