- [Announcer] The 3D Max viewport settings allow us
to control the quality of the display.
We can achieve anything from a very simplistic
but very performance oriented display
up to almost complete photorealism or anything in between.
The precondition of all of that is that
we are in default shading mode.
As long as we're in default shading mode
then we can control the lighting and materials.
The first thing we want to look at
is the distinction between standard mode
and high quality mode.
Standard mode gives us control
over each one of the lighting and material options.
High quality mode just turns on
all of the lighting bells and whistles.
Let's see what that looks like.
Let's go into the third menu from the left.
This is the shading menu
and it's currently reading out the word standard.
Click on that word standard
and switch this over to high quality.
And it may take a really long time
on your computer for it to actually update.
There's a lot going on in high quality mode
including something called the progressive display
of environment shadows or skylight shadows.
And that's going to be very slow.
Additionally, you may see all of your objects
turn into a checker pattern.
That's happening because 3D Max is compiling
all the materials and lights against one another.
That's a process where it has to
sort of read the entire scene and then
kind of bake it into something that can be displayed
by your video hardware.
So don't be alarmed if it takes a really long time
for the screen to update.
And you may even need to
sort of wiggle your mouse pan around
with the middle mouse button in order to force that update.
Okay, so that's high quality mode.
That's going to turn on all the lighting options
but it's not going to enable any Maps.
I actually have some textures in this scene.
For example, I've got some wood paneling here
high quality mode doesn't deal with that.
I don't really use high quality mode.
I actually prefer to use standard mode
and to adjust each one of the parameters individually.
So I'm going to go back over to standard mode.
Once I've done that, I can go back into this menu again
and I can access the options
for lighting and shadows or materials.
First let's look at lighting and shadows.
By default standard mode uses default lights
meaning we have a kind of over the shoulder light
that's behind the perspective camera
or whatever camera we're using.
We want to switch this over to illuminate with scene lights
in order to see the actual lighting in the scene.
When we do that, however, by default in standard mode
we don't actually see all of the lights.
I've got lots of these fluorescent tubes up here.
And we can see that the ones over here
in the back are not actually on.
We're not seeing any illumination back there.
So we only get four lights by default
with that option that we just enabled.
We'll see how to fix that in a moment.
We can go back in here, to lighting and shadows
and turn that back to illuminate with default lights.
Additionally, you may have noticed
if you go into lighting and shadows,
that there's an option for shadows
and for ambient occlusion.
Ambient occlusion will only work
if we go into to an advanced lighting mode.
So if we turn this on now
we won't see the ambient occlusion effect
which of course is the contact shadows
or the kind of darkness in crevices.
So we'll need to go into another dialogue
in order to actually make that work.
I'll turn that back off again here.
For full control over all the lighting options
we will want to go into a separate dialogue
and that's going to be found once again
in that shading dialogue, go to active viewport settings.
And this is a display
of all of the settings for the current viewport.
We've got a couple tabs here.
We've got settings, we have preferences.
And here we can do things like
turn edged faces on and off and so on,
or filters, we can choose to display certain objects
in the current viewport or not.
Right now we're concerned with the settings
and we've got the standard preset here
but we're going to make this beautiful.
First thing we'll want to do is set the rendering level
change that to advanced.
And once we've done that
if we change the lighting and shadows illuminate option
over to scene lights, unlimited lights,
now we've got all the lights in our scene.
No shadows yet 'cause we haven't turned that on
but you can see we're getting lighting back here.
So we can go in here and change up some more options.
We have shadows, turn that on
and it may take a moment to update
but we can see that there are definitely shadows.
We also have ambient occlusion.
It'll be easier to see if we turn the shadows off
and turn ambient occlusion on.
And it may be a little bit subtle
but we are getting some contact shadows.
We can improve this by increasing the radius.
Let's set the ambient occlusion radius to 20
and now we've got kind of a more dramatic AO effect.
Maybe bring that down a little bit,
set the intensity to one.
Turn the cast shadows back on again
and we've got a pretty decent result here.
One thing that I do want to point out
is this progressive skylight option.
If we turned on high quality mode
then this would be enabled.
And what that does is allows the shadows from a skylight
or environment light to progressively update.
And it's actually very slow.
In a case such as this where we're using
more traditional lighting setup with these tube lights,
we don't want progressive skylight.
It's actually just going to slow our whole scene way down.
So we're doing pretty well here.
There's another thing that we can look at
under additional parameters, material rendering level.
This lets us choose
whether we're going to be rendering high quality materials
in the viewport or not.
And we can change this up to advanced material if we want.
It's not going to have a lot of effect right now
because our textures are currently disabled.
Once we've made these changes
and we have the settings we want
we should probably save this as a preset.
So we can go up here to the little save icon,
the floppy disk icon, click on that
and we're going to create a new preset.
We're not going to overwrite this standard preset.
We're going to create a new one.
So we'll call this one high quality user preset,
something like that and click, okay.
And now that's listed here.
We can close this dialogue and now we can see that
that name is listed here
and we can switch this over to standard mode
or we can switch it over to our high quality mode
by choosing user defined
and then choosing our user defined preset.
All right, pretty cool.
Finally, we want to enable textures or Maps
and that can be done in the material editor
on a per texture or per material basis,
but we want to do it just globally
for everything in the scene.
And to do that, we can go into our shading menu
to materials and then we have some options here.
There are two material display options or modes in Max.
There's standard, also known as shaded material
and that's going to be faster.
So it's more oriented for heavy scenes
and then there're so called realistic
or advanced material mode.
And that's going to be more beautiful.
We want to make sure that we're only using one of these modes
so I'm going to choose shaded materials without Maps.
And what that does is set every material
that's currently in the scene to the old school shaded mode
or simplified mode.
And we're going to go back in there
to materials and choose realistic materials with Maps.
And this may take a moment to process.
It's calculating, it's compiling all these materials
and that may take a moment.
So don't panic if all your objects turn into checkers.
And finally we can see that our display is updated
and we're getting pretty decent results here
in our viewport.
So we can always switch this back over
into standard mode if this is getting too heavy.
So we can just go back to standard mode
and it's going to have to compile in standard mode again.
So this is just a process you need to get used to in Max
whenever you switch between material modes
you may have to wait for a moment
for all of those textures and lights to compile.