Week 4

Lighting Techniques

This week in our tutorial we were taught a couple of easy lighting techniques. I have used these before but there were a couple of the modifiers that were new to me.

I firstt created a scene consisting of a teapot, stairs and two spheres which lay on a plane. I then selected the lighting symbol and changed the drop down menu to standard instead of photometric and selected target spotlight, and dragged onto the scene, making sure the scene was in a perspective view port so that I can see the changes in light.

One of the advantages of adding lighting is shadows which can be turned on by selecting on under the general parameters of the target spotlight.

Another useful lighting technique is changing the colour of the light which helps set a mood in a scene which is shown below using green light.

The light shape can also be changed from circular to rectangular by selecting the attenuation, which is under the general parameters.


Ray-tracing - Chrome and glass materials
I've never used ray-tracing before in 3D studio max to produce chrome and glass materials, but the technique is very simple and looks very professional.

Chrome material
 
To create my chrome teapot I firstcreated a simple scene in a box as I will later be adding light.

Once the scene was made, I opened the material editor and selected a slot, and in the maps roll out selected reflection and then clicked on the 'none box' and chose ray-trace, I then dragged the material to the object and rendered. 

Chrome teapot

Glass material

Using the same scene I can change the shapes to glass, by opening the material editor and selecting a empty slot and clicking on background so that my material shows up, and making sure that my diffuse colour is black. Then using the same maps rollout as in the chrome tutorial but selecting refraction this time so that the light can pass through the object, and then selecting raytrace. I then clicked and dragged the material to the selected shapes and rendered.

Glass shapes

Lastly to finish the scene I added a skylight and placed the light in front of the scene to produce a matt finish.