Night Scene in 3DS Max

ajv3d

Good evening,

I'm building a night scene in 3DS and I have a couple lighting questions. I'm using a skylight, spot lights for the spot lights and omni lights set for ambient only to light the area...I needed to make the floor transparent and duplicate the geometry to fake reflections, but now the floor is lighting funny because of the ambient lighting. Any recommendations?

percydaman

so your saying this is a viewport realtime screenshot?

ajv3d

Hi percydaman. No, this is a rendered image.

percydaman wrote: »

so your saying this is a viewport realtime screenshot?

Daniel Doerksen

why fake reflections, why not create a reflective material

ajv3d

The art test specified transparent floor with duplicated geometry. My problem is I'm loosing the color of the cement from the ambient lights....

keres

Is there a reason for using a skylight and not a directional light w/ global illumination?

ajv3d

No particular reason, I need to bake all the lights for a light map and wasn't to sure how global illumination would affect the render to texture for the light mapping in Max. I'm dreading the light mapping.

ajv3d

Making some more progress on this scene. Pointers are welcome. Advice on how to lightmap this scene would be helpful. I would hate to copy all the UVs of every mesh to a second UV map and pack them all, that would take HOURS.

nordahl154

Maybe the real test is to find a way around making the ground transparent and copying the containers, like making the ground slightly reflective, thus saving polygons and rendering time? :poly121:

ajv3d

Hmm, you're the second person to recommend this... I think I'm picking up on something.

fmnoor

If it's for the gameloft art test, do it the old school way of transparent + duplicating geometry. Also yes, unwrapping for lightmaps by hand is a pain in the ass unless you use plugins

ajv3d

Hi fmnoor, you guessed it. OK, thanks for the heads up... and yeah, light mapping by hand is a pain and I don't want to use Flatiron so I'll be hitting scriptspot. Thanks for the heads up.

KennyTies

Noticed you where trying to figure out a way to make light maps with out have to repack them every single time. A way to do this with out trying to repack your uv's, is just when you go down where you choose your channel, there is a save and load button right below that. Save the first uv channel then switch over to channel two and load it in.

ajv3d

Hi KennyTies,

That's a good idea, there's a couple hundred objects in the scene, I'm assuming I'd need to save out the UV map for each object and load them into the light map channel? then pack them all at once?

duxun

is this for gameloft ???

KennyTies

well, alls you would have to do is load the uv channels into channel two already pre-packed from your first uv channel. But yes you would need to save out the uv maps for each object.

ajv3d

Here's the lightmap for my scene! Now all I need to do is figure out how to combine it with my diffuse and vertex color. I'd like to keep my materials to a minimum though, any advice?

ajv3d

Ok, I applied the lightmap to the entire scene and it's showing. BUT, for some when I combine it with the diffuse and vertex color channels within the material the lightmap doesn't show up at all in my renders.

I created a standard material and plugged the lightmap into the self-illumination channel in the MAPS section of the material. I also created an RGB Multiply in the diffuse channel in the material and plugged my texture in slot 1, and a vertex color channel, in slot 2. I applied the material to the objects, but the lightmap doesn't show at all...... very confused Help?

ajv3d

It seems they lightmap IS there, it's just really weak for some reason. I've attached two screen shots of what the rendered lighting looks like with both the lights in the scene, and without them just using the light map. Any help on this would be appreciated...

WITH LIGHTS:



WITHOUT (baked lights):



Both were rendered using mental ray.