Lighting in Max 2010 with mental ray

Link702

I am working on lighting this bathroom. The toilet looks retarded and the textures could be better I know but I can easily change those later. I need help with the lighting http://postimage.org/image/tcx3gnwk3/.

Currently this scene has no lights in it. I think I have the illuimation set to like 1.0 and have the automatic exposure on. Any tips and help will be greatly appreciated.

Aga22

i never managed to work well with automatic exposure. i say use photometric lights, and you can either use indirect illumination or just use the final gathering only. Aren't you gonna put any lights on the ceiling? its gonna be really gloomy if you don't. Anyway, use a self illuminated material for the lights on the mirror, they will give off an illumination too, and as you advance you can use subsurface scattering on them for better realism. A big improvement will be if you add some glossy reflections on the ceramics with the arch and design material, glossiness set to about 0.3-0.4 and reflection to around 0.6. Almost everything is reflective more or less and that gives a degree of realism to a picture.

Link702

Aga22 wrote: »

i never managed to work well with automatic exposure. i say use photometric lights, and you can either use indirect illumination or just use the final gathering only. Aren't you gonna put any lights on the ceiling? its gonna be really gloomy if you don't. Anyway, use a self illuminated material for the lights on the mirror, they will give off an illumination too, and as you advance you can use subsurface scattering on them for better realism. A big improvement will be if you add some glossy reflections on the ceramics with the arch and design material, glossiness set to about 0.3-0.4 and reflection to around 0.6. Almost everything is reflective more or less and that gives a degree of realism to a picture.

Thank You. I honestly don't even know what automatic exposure does. I do think I will add ceiling lights. The ceramics were done by uv mapping and texturing in Photoshop, will I still be able to add the glossyiness if that's the case?

Aga22

yes the glossiness doesnt affect the diffuse mapping of the material... i'd say read the documentation of the arch and design material, or better a book on mental ray rendering, youll understand a lot.