Lights are objects that simulate real lights such as household or office lamps, the light instruments used in stage and film work, and the sun itself. Adding lights to a scene can help give it a more realistic appearance. If a scene contains geometry but no light objects, 3ds Max provides default lighting. But as soon as you add a light object to the scene, the default lighting is turned off. Setting up lighting is not difficult, but in order to do it well you need to plan ahead and experiment.
How you set up lights for a scene, depends on the purpose of your rendering or animation. Lighting situations fall into two broad categories:
Lighting an outdoor daylight scene is a special case of this, because 3ds Max has special features for daylight.
Lighting an interior space
Whether the subject is a character, a still life, or other detail, the principles of lighting are much the same.
Lighting a subject
In this tutorial, you will learn how to:
Skill level: Beginner
Time to complete: 30 minutes
All the files necessary to do this tutorial can be found on the program disc. Before doing the tutorials, copy the \tutorials\lights directory from the disc to your local program installation.
