- [Instructor] In this chapter,
we'll get an introduction to lighting in 3ds Max.
So see most accurate feedback setting up lights,
we can run an interactive production rendering or IPR.
We previously saw how to set up
the Nitrous viewport options
to get a good approximation of the lighting and shading.
Nitrous can render some pretty good direct illumination,
but it does not support ray tracing.
That means there's no bounce light and no proper reflections
and there are some other limitations.
When designing lighting, we should preview the results
in our private production renderer,
which is Arnold by default in Max.
There are actually two forms of IPR for Anold.
ActiveShade and the Arnold Render View.
ActiveShade is the generic IPR
that works with other renderers.
The Arnold Render View or ARV
only works with Arnold.
Each has its advantages.
ActiveShade can run in a viewport.
The ARV cannot.
ARV has helpful features not found in ActiveShade,
such as snapshots and rendering statistics.
But for the sake of simplicity and compatibility
with other renderers,
I'm going to use ActiveShade in this course.
Let's go into the Render Setup dialog.
On the main toolbar, we've got some teapot icons
on the far right.
Render Setup is the one that looks
like a teapot with a gear.
Click on that.
Up at the top is a pulldown list labeled Target.
When we choose a different target from this pulldown list,
the settings that we choose
will apply to that target mode.
So we can store different settings for each target.
The default target is Production Rendering Mode,
which is for offline rendering of images to disk.
It's not interactive.
Let's switch the target mode over to ActiveShade mode.
And then we need to choose a renderer.
The default renderer is Arnold.
If we click on that pulldown list,
we'll see we have a couple other options.
We'll talk more about this
when we get to the chapter on rendering.
For now, we're just going to use Arnold.
To maximize productivity,
we want to make a couple quick adjustments
to the processing settings for Arnold.
In the System tab,
in the Render Settings rollout,
down at the bottom, there's this section labeled Threads.
That gives us control over how Arnold uses
the computer's processing power.
We can set it up to allow some processing overhead
so that other operations in 3ds Max won't be slowed down.
When Auto-Detect Threads is enabled,
that's going to use 100%
of your computer's processing power.
Now you need to know how many cores your CPU has
or more specifically,
how many virtual cores are available
on your Windows computer.
I'm working on a quad-core processor
with hyper-threading enabled,
which gives eight virtual cores or eight threads.
I want to leave two threads open.
That way, I won't have any issues with interactivity in Max.
The way to do that is to disable Auto-Detect Threads
and then set the number of threads manually.
Since I've got eight threads available,
if I set the Threads value to six,
then I'm leaving two threads open for other processes,
such as interactivity in the viewports.
There's actually a more elegant way to do this.
If we set Threads to a negative value,
we'll subtract that number from the total number
of threads available.
If I set the Threads value to negative two,
then I will end up using six
out of my eight cores or threads.
Now of course, if you have a different number of cores
or virtual cores on your machine,
you'll want to set these values differently.
But for ActiveShade, I recommend leaving two threads open.
Otherwise, you may have some issues with interactivity.
I should mention in passing
that in the Device rollout down here,
we have the ability to render on the CPU
or on the GPU.
The GPU mode uses the NVIDIA rendering hardware
to accelerate the rendering.
It's only compatible with NVIDIA.
Not with AMD or Intel.
And it's usually much faster than the default CPU rendering.
But again, there are some limitations.
If you want to learn about GPU rendering,
check out my course 3ds Max: Rendering with Arnold
for version 2020.
Moving on, in the Arnold Renderer tab,
there's an option that will give us
a little bit faster feedback,
especially for slow rendering scenes.
In the Sampling and Ray Depth rollout,
at the bottom, there's a section,
adaptive and progressive.
I want to enable Progressive Render.
For interactive production rendering,
it's helpful to enable the switch, Progressive Render.
This updates the pixels in the frame randomly.
So Arnold draws the image in passes.
The first pass is the preview pass,
which is a very blocky image,
and it's drawn in a series of square regions called buckets.
When the preview pass is finished,
Arnold draws the final pass.
If Progressive Render is turned off,
then the finally pass is also drawn in buckets,
but if Progressive Render is on,
the pixels of the final pass are updated randomly.
And that gives us faster feedback
because we don't have to wait for buckets to draw.
The entire frame updates together,
starting out very grainy,
and getting progressively more refined.
Okay, we can initiate the ActiveShade window
using the resolution which we've sent in the Common tab
as we saw previously.
We can either click on the big Render button
within the Render Setup dialog,
or we can click on the ActiveShade render button
over here on the main toolbar,
which now looks like a teapot with a triangle
which is meant to indicate a Play button.
So we can either click on that or the big render button.
Either way, the ActiveShade window will launch
and we'll start to see our interactive production rendering.
And it is fully interactive.
We're rendering the perspective view right now
because that's what's chosen here in View To Render.
If I go over to that perspective view
and just navigate, move around with the middle mouse button,
we can see that the Arnold rendering is updating
in real time.
And we can zoom in or dolly in,
Control + Alt + middle mouse.
We can also manipulate objects.
We can for example select that desk object
and grab the Move tool and reposition it
and the ActiveShade window updates automatically.
Okay I'll undo that with Control + Z.
There's an even more intuitive way to use ActiveShade.
We can load it directly into a viewport.
I'll close the ActiveShade window
and close the Render Setup window.
Go over to my perspective view
and before launching ActiveShade in a viewport,
we should be aware of the resolution of that viewport.
A large viewport will have an adverse effect
on interactivity.
That is, if the viewport resolution is high,
for example, if the viewport is maximized,
then that's going to introduce some latency in navigation
or in editing scene parameters.
So ActiveShade works best in a small viewport like this one.
Within each viewport, the third of the viewport menus
from the left, is called the shading menu,
and mine currently says Viewport Realistic
because I previously created a viewport preset by that name.
Click on that Shading menu
and we can just initiate ActiveShade from that menu
from the very top.
Go ahead and click ActiveShade using Arnold.
And that'll take just a moment to initialize,
but once again, we have a fully interactive rendering here
so we can move our desk around, for example,
and that'll update or I can undo that with Control + Z
or I can navigate around, once again with the middle mouse
and position or dolly forward, Control + Alt + middle mouse.
It's fully interactive.
We can also overlay some Nitrous elements.
We can see that we've got the Nitrous viewport highlighting.
That's always there.
We got our gizmo for the Move tool.
We can also do things that enable a wireframe shading mode.
So what we can do here is press the F4 key
and that will enable edged faces
which superimposes those edged faces
over our Arnold rendering
which gives us a kind of a hidden line effect.
Okay, we can turn that back off again with F4.
And we can exit out of ActiveShade
by clicking on the Cancel button up here at the top
in the viewport menus
and that is how to use ActiveShade in a floating window
or directly in a viewport.