- [Instructor] The physical sun and sky environment map
simulates natural daylight.
It's great for architectural lighting studies,
because we can plug in geographic coordinates
and date and time information,
and see what our building would look like,
at that location and time.
We can also manually control the sun position,
and art direct parameters
to achieve a variety of natural lighting effects.
Currently, I've got a scene with no environment.
If we go into the rendering menu, to environment,
we'll see we've got nothing in the environment map,
and exposure control is currently disabled.
The sun and sky environment
is controlled by the sun positioner light type.
And that is different from the other light types in Max,
the sun positioner is not technically a light source,
it's merely a manipulator, or a gizmo,
to control a procedural environment map,
which will be placed in here, called physical sun and sky.
Okay, let's create the sun positioner,
and that will also so create the environment map.
Go over to the create panel, to the lights sub-panel,
and in the photometric category, you'll see sun positioner.
So click on that button, and go over to the top viewport,
and click and hold your mouse down and drag.
And you're setting a radius for a compass rose,
and the size of it doesn't matter
for the purposes of lighting.
This is merely just going to be sized
at whatever's convenient to you.
So once you have the size that you want,
then release the mouse and move that mouse cursor around,
but you're not holding it down, just moving it around.
And look over in the create panel.
You'll see that in the display rollout here,
there's a parameter called north offset.
And that's determining the direction of north.
If you've set up your scene so that north
points in the positive Y axis,
then you'll want a north offset value of zero.
If you've oriented your plan differently,
then you would want the north direction
to be some other direction, but I want to render this,
such that my courtyard wall is south facing,
and that would give me a north offset of zero.
So once you have the north offset value you want,
click the mouse button, and once again,
don't hold it down, but just move it.
And now you're setting the distance of the sun,
from the compass rose.
While the light coming from the sun
is actually at an infinite distance.
So this value over here,
is again, only for your visual convenience.
So it creates a vector between this sun gizmo
and the compass rose,
that will help you visualize the angle of the sun.
But the actual distance here doesn't matter,
so just set that to whatever's convenient.
I'm going to set that to about 20 meters or so.
Click the mouse button again,
and we've completed the operation.
We've created our compass rose, of the sun positioner.
We don't want to create another sun,
we're still in the sun positioner create mode,
so we'll right click to exit it out of that tool.
In the environment and effects dialogue we'll see,
now we have a physical sun and sky environment installed.
And additionally, exposure control is automatically enabled.
Well we want to stop immediately, and make sure we turn off
the tone mapping that is applied automatically.
Remember we want to scroll down,
and in the image control section,
we want to set this up for a linear response,
that's not changing the contrast curve.
Set the highlights value to one,
we can leave the mid tones at one,
set the shadows to zero and press enter,
and now we have a perfectly linear response,
with no tone mapping.
Okay, we can close this dialogue.
Let's see what this looks like in an active shade render.
Click in the perspective view to give it focus.
And on the main toolbar click active shade.
That'll take a moment to kick in.
Once it does, we can orbit around in our perspective view,
alt and middle mouse, and take a look from different angles.
And if we look from directly below the compass rose,
we should see the sun appear in our active shade rendering.
So the sun is actually a visible object in our background,
and of course it's providing illumination.
And the environment is providing illumination as well,
the sky, and also the ground plane
are illuminating the scene,
but of course they're not as bright as the sun.
Okay, I'll just restore my perspective view
back to approximately what I had,
just a neutral overhead view.
From now on I want to render the camera view.
So click in that viewport to give it focus,
and then we see that renders in the active shade window,
and let's lock that, so go into the render setup dialogue.
And up near the top we see, view to render,
quad four phys camera 001.
Click the little padlock icon next to that.
And now even when we select a different viewport,
we will still render that camera review.
All right, so that is how to set up the physical sun
and sky environment, in the next movie,
we'll look at art directing that environment.