| Lighting - Let's bring in some light to our 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX ) scenes |
I have already mentioned that what we do in 3D Modeling and animation has got very much similarity with the real world situations. When it comes to lighting, the same rule applies. 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX ) provides illumination of a scene and it's objects through lights, as it is in the real world. Different types of lights we have at our disposal in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). In this lesson we are going to have the foundation on lighting. |
| Setting up the scene for lighting in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) - Tutorial / Lesson |
So far in this tutorial, we had been dealing with our simple teapot alone. Here lets create a small base for the teapot in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) and put a material to it. If you just want to directly jump to lighting, then you can download the scene that we are going to create directly here and use it. But i recommend doing the scene yourself.
We start from our single teapot scene. If it is not currently with you, then download it here (chap3-mat-edit.max) . Now that the file is opened in 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX ), let's create a box below the teapot to act as a base. We need a base because we need a place to cast our shadows of lighting. ok? From the Create panel  , within 'Geometry' with Standard primitives active, choose Box to create a box. Click and drag in the top viewport until you created a box large enough to act as the teapot's base. Refer back to Chapter-1 if you don't remember the basics of creating a box. The dimensions do not actually matter for now since we are going to modify the values in the Modify Panel.
Now that we have created the box in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ), let's edit its size in the Modify Panel. Click on the Modify Panel  tab and Enter the following values. (Make sure that the Box you created is the currently selected object in the viewport). Length=150, Width=150, Height= -15 . Now the viewports should look like this |
to move it to the position shown in the figure shown above.
icon to open it. We have already used the first slot in the Material Editor with the Chrome texture for our teapot. If we assign another texture to that slot, our teapot will lose its chrome texture. Instead we can use the second slot in the Material Editor. Click on the second slot to select it and click on Get Material 
button. Choose Mtl_Library in the 'Browse From' category in the Material Browser window. Within the list of available materials, double click on the 'Bricks_Bricks_2' to select it (For 3d max trial version users: 
button in the Material Editor. This assigns the brick texture to our box object in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ).
