- [Instructor] Now we're ready to create a light.
In this version of the office scene,
I've defined a viewport preset
for advanced lighting and shading,
so we'll get fairly good fidelity.
There are currently no lights in this scene
and I have edged faces enabled
so that I can see object wireframes
on top of the shaded surfaces.
If I press F4 to disable edged faces,
then the viewport goes completely black.
This viewport is set up to render
scene lights instead of default lights,
but currently there are no scene lights
and the viewport background is set
to display the scene environment
but there is no environment enabled in the scene.
Under these conditions, we'll see no illumination at all
which is a good starting point for accurate previews
of photometric lights.
Okay. I'll turn edged faces back on with F4.
Let's create a light.
In the create panel, go to the lights subpanel.
it looks like an old school incandescent bulb.
Click on that icon.
We have a pull down list. It's labeled photometric.
Click on that and see what's in there.
There are three categories of lights available,
photometric, standard, and Arnold.
In this course, I'm going to try to be
as renderer agnostic as possible.
In other words, I want to maintain compatibility
with different renderers, and I want to try to use
features that will more or less
work the same in any renderer.
I'm not going to cover the Arnold light,
even though it's very powerful,
since it only works in Arnold.
If you want to learn about the Arnold light,
then check out my other course,
3ds Max rendering with Arnold.
The photometric light will work
with pretty much any renderer.
The standard lights are legacy lights
that are not physically accurate.
They use an old shading model from the 90s,
and it's difficult to get realistic results.
There are actually very few situations
in which standard lights will be useful,
and only if you're rendering
with the legacy scan line renderer
or with the Quicksilver hardware renderer.
Arnold does not support the standard lights at all,
because they're not physically accurate.
Generally you'll want to use the photometric light
whenever possible, because it's physically accurate
and will give the most realistic results.
So I'll go back to photometric.
There's only one photometric light object type,
but it can be configured to represent
many different light sources, like a point light,
area light, spotlight, and so on.
And just like the cameras in Max,
the photometric light can be targeted or free.
So we see two buttons here, target light and free light.
We can turn the target or LookAt point
on and off after we've created the light,
so it doesn't matter whether we create
a free light or a target light.
There's also a button here that's labeled sun positioner
and that's for a daylight system.
We'll look at that later.
For artificial lighting, we're going to use
the photometric lights.
Let's click on the button labeled free light,
and we immediately get a popup dialogue,
photometric light creation.
You are creating a photometric light.
It is recommended that you use
the physical camera exposure control.
Well, what's all this then?
Exposure control is a method
for mapping physical illumination values
to the brightness values of rendered pixels.
It's very similar to the iris
or the sensitivity settings on a real world camera.
We will look at exposure control in another movie.
So the question we're posed here
is would you like to change this now,
meaning would you like to enable exposure control?
And the answer is, in this case, no.
And now we're ready to create our light.
As we move our cursor around,
we're about to establish a position for creating light.
Just click anywhere, and that light is created
and it's created right at the construction plane
which in this case is the XY plane of the world.
And you notice that all of my materials
turned into checkers and that's because 3ds Max
has to compile all the materials
against this newly created light.
And if it doesn't refresh,
you might need to navigate with the middle mouse button.
Just kind of wiggle your mouse and it'll refresh.
So now we've got our light created.
We don't need the edged faces anymore,
so we can turn that off with F4
and grab the move tool and bring that up,
position it somewhere in the middle of the room.
Okay, that's how to create a photometric light.