Jacquelin Vanderwood

August 15, 2000

This is a powerful video series on rendering and lighting in 3D Studio Max conducted by Frank De Lise. You'll go back time and again to review what you've learned. It's a great reference!

In this 2-video series, the basics of lighting are covered in detail. I'd like to give you a list of quite a few of the high points of the video to give you an idea of what is covered. The first portion of the videos teaches on the lighting menu, target spot light, key light, moving light sources around, changing hot spots and fall offs, distance, option types, intensity, offset surfaces, creating different types of effects, contrast, making hard and soft edges, specular highlights, showing the cone, the light cone (circular and rectangular), overshooting, adjusting aspect ratio, projector map and applying a bitmap onto an image, attenuation, far attenuation, decaying a light source (inverse falloff), shadows (shadow maps), texture maps for shadows, creating colored shadows, blurring and sharpening shadows, ambient lighting, adjusting bias, changing density of shadow, negative shadows, raytraced shadows, atmosphere shadows, and free spot light. In addition, the target direct light is highlighted along with the sunlight feature as well as straight rays of light. Also discussed is the free direction light, the omni light, cast shadows, how to create 6 spotlights, projecting an image in all directions, and the include and exclude option. Effects and environment are also discussed. Some of the highlights taught are atmosphere and effects, attaching volumetric lighting, attenuation color, creating smoke in a light beam, sitting noise and density, and applying wind. Concurrently, Frank De Lise teaches on adding an effect to a light source such as glow, making it interactive, secondary elements such as applying shapes, and lens flare.

Project 1 deals with bounced lighting and caustics in a room with an overhead light. We're shown how to create an omni light and add elements of diffuse and ambience, deleting ambient lights, adding lights, attenuation, light decay, adding projects to a scene to create shadows, adjusting shadow properties, adjusting bias and sample range, radiosity of bounced light and global illumination, setting the color of lights, removing hot spots using the exclude option, and adding ambient lights. In addition, a chrome ball and a glass ball are created to with various effects of lighting procedures covering generating caustics, adding pinpoint lighting, generating a gradient and a texture map, and dragging the shadow map onto the materials editor. Below is a snapshot of the room taken from the 3D Studio Max 3 online tutorial.

In project 2, we are shown a scene with cylinder in it and how to apply area lights (omni). Also, instancing lights are covered and how to change their attributes, shadow maps, intensity and softening, and creating photorealistic imaging with lights.

Project 3 deals with raytracing, falloff, and shadows. The model in this project is a tire and rim. Frank De Lise teaches how to apply tread, create the bump map, tiling the tire tread, creating a mask on the bump map channel in the gradient ramp using black-to-white, radial gradient, adjusting the gradient so that tiling will fall off at the right place, and adding specular highlights. With the rim we are taught how to raytrace a texture map, using the Anisotropic shader, and adjusting specular highlight to follow the surface.

Project 4's theme is creating realistic peaches. The Oren-Nayer-Blinn shader is used, spot lights, adjusting hot spots and fall offs, adjusting shadows, adding fill lights using omni lights and setting the color (back lighting), adding texture, adding color illumination, key lighting, rotating material, creating a product shot using matte shadow, changing anti-aliasing in Rendering, other filters in Rendering are highlighted, and the Ram player is discussed.

In Project 5 we learn procedural noise and displacement mapping. The final model for this lesson will be the creation of an a lifelike burning, hot lava planet. Explicit map channeling is covered along with the self-illumination channel, fractal noise, sizing, noise levels, swapping colors, displacement channel adjustments, surface properties, sub-division preset, Oren-Nayer-Blinn shader, copying colors, and diffuse levels.

Project 6 is a scene where water, sky, clouds, and sunlight are created. Taught in this lesson are raytracing, lens effects, adjusting fall off curves, color adjustment, adding fog, right-clicking background to grab color and copy to fog, creating clouds using combustion, atmospheric gizmo for creating clouds, rendering environmental adjustments for combustion, creating new seeds for copying of clouds to create new clouds, UVW mapping for wake of waves and non-tiling of wakes using local access, adding post effects, and making adjustments in real-time.

Project 7's model is a helicopter. This lesson is about incorporating a CG element into a real background. Elements discussed are creating a plain, matte shadowing and material, setting brightness and contrast, render effects, the blur filter, and film grain.

In the 8th lesson, the model used is blades of a helicopter. In this tutorial two kinds of motion blurs are discussed--object-based motion blur and image-based, along with setting samples in the Render dialogue box.

Finally, the Rendering interface and it's meanings are touched upon, and how to change more rendering items in Preferences. 

A Bonus-project of creating shadows on translucent leaves with an apple in the background is a nice surprise. 

As you can see, these two videos cover a wealth of information on rendering and lighting. Frank De Lise is a superb teacher and there is so much to learn.

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Copyright 2000, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved