MAX mental ray lighting rig
polycounter lvl 19
anyone got a decent global illumination rig they can send my way? I spend too long faffing with lighting and never get it right for a simple render to show player models standing on a white floor with a white sky... I'm using MAX 6 btw
Replies
- Create -> Skylight.
- Press "9" - turn on "Use Advanced Lighting".
- Press "8" - set background colour to something like light blue or grey.
- Create a plane for a floor, apply a default Matte/Shadow material to it.
- Render. No need for mental ray, Max's renderer is fine for standard global illumination.
Optional:
- Create -> Target Spot, position it above, in front and to one side of your character, set the colour to a light blue or yellow, Multiplier to 0.8(ish). Turn the Skylight's multiplier down to 0.5 or so, otherwise the whole scene will be too bright.
- Add an underlight and/or a high-intensity edge backlight if you want one.
- Render.
The easiest way to do this in Max is to
- put your model on a plane
- add a skylight to the scene (anywhere, it doesn't matter)
- turn on Light Tracer (Rendering > Advanced Lighting > Light Tracer)
The defualt settings on the skylight and light tracer will work fine. If you want it to render faster, lower the number of Rays/Samples in Light Tracer, and raise the number for Subdivide Down To:.
Try increasing the Bounce number in Light Tracer to 1 or 2 for more realistic results.
You can add a regular light to the scene with Diffuse turned off and Specular kept on if you want some specular highlights.
You can add an HDR map to the skylight for more natural lighting. Be sure to instance the map to the Mat Editor and change it to Environ and Spherical Mapping (or whatever kind of mapping the HDR map was made to use). You might also have to turn up the multiplier on the skylight and increase the settings in the Light Tracer to get good results.
Hope that helps.
quick test:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!