Viewers: in countries Watching now:
In 3ds Max 2011 Essential Training, author Aaron F. Ross demonstrates how to use this top-tier application for digital content creation, widely used in diverse industries such as architecture, industrial design, motion pictures, games and virtual worlds. This course covers modeling with polygons, curves, and subdivision surfaces, defining surface properties with materials and maps, setting up cameras and lights, animating objects, and final output rendering. Exercise files accompany the course.
We are now going to take a look at some basic properties of lights, including the light Intensity and Color. So in order to better visualize the effect, I am going to activate ActiveShade in my Camera View once again, ActiveShade. And this just gives me a pretty good approximation of what it will look like when it's finally rendered. I am going to select the Spotlight, maybe move it up a little bit, and go to the Modify panel.
I can play around with some of the most basic Parameters, such as Intensity and Color. So you will see here, there is a rollout that says Intensity/Color/Attenuation. I will open that up. And what we have here is a Multiplier value that represents the strength of the light. And the default is actually 1. Previously, I played with this a little bit and changed it up a bit, and so now I have got it back down to the default value of 1. So again, this is not a photometric value. It bears no relationship to any kind of metrics in the real world.
It's a purely arbitrary value. If I set it to 0.5, we will have reduced Intensity, as you can see in my ActiveShade window. If I increase it to 2, it's going to be very intense, and it's actually going to be blasted out. So in general, with a scene such as this, with standard lighting, the total value of all of the multipliers of all of your lights usually shouldn't exceed a value of about 2.0. And as always, your mileage may vary, but you will find that if you have ten lights in your scene, and they all have the default multiplier of 1, no matter where they are, your scene is going to get blasted out.
You don't necessarily want that. So I am going to set this back down to maybe like 1.1. We have also got a Color Swatch here. So currently I am just shooting white light out into the scene, but if I wanted to do colored light, I just click on the Color Swatch here. And again, this is going to update in real-time. So if I turn this up to red, it thinks about it for a second, and then my ActiveShade will update. So I can put any color I want. There is blue light. I will take this back down to something more reasonable, a lot less saturation, maybe a little bit of an orange tint on that. Cool! So that's some basics about Intensity and Color.
There are currently no FAQs about 3ds Max 2011 Essential Training.
Access exercise files from a button right under the course name.
Search within course videos and transcripts, and jump right to the results.
Remove icons showing you already watched videos if you want to start over.
Make the video wide, narrow, full-screen, or pop the player out of the page into its own window.
Click on text in the transcript to jump to that spot in the video. As the video plays, the relevant spot in the transcript will be highlighted.