Tutorial : Introduction to Lighting

Many of the traditional artist’s skills are in recreating the effects of lighting, such as trying to imitate shadows, reflections, or the play of light on surfaces.

3ds max lets you create the same effects by using lights. If you master the control of lights, your scenes and animations can look spectacular.

3ds max provides three types of lights: standard, daylight, and photometric.

Standard lights are computer-based objects that simulate lights. However, unlike Photometric lights, Standard lights do not have physically-based intensity values.

Daylight lights are used to simulate sunlight, and the effects of the sky on that light. They should be used exclusively for outdoor lighting simulation.

Photometric lights use photometric (light energy) values that enable you to more accurately define lights as they would be in the real world. You can set their distribution, intensity, color temperature, and other characteristics of real-world lights. You can also import specific photometric files available from lighting manufacturers to design lighting based on commercially available lights.

Photometric lights provide more realistic lighting, and take a lot of guess work out of light placement; just place them as you would place a regular light. However, because they act like real lights, they require realistic geometry, which is not always ideal for an artist. Many artists will only model the visible parts of their scene; an example is a room in a house. Often times, an artist will remove a wall so that you can see into the room. This is fine for standard lights, however photometric lights will not look right when rendered with this sort of setup. All of the light which normally bounces off the wall that has been removed will be lost. With photometric lights, you must have accurate geometry, and you must be careful to remove (or minimize) light leaks, or structural inaccuracies. In addition to the added modeling time with photometric lights, radiosity calculations can also be extremely time consuming, depending on the complexity of your scene.

Important: You should not combine photometric lights and standard lights in a scene. Choose one or the other, as they behave very differently and do not interact correctly.

This tutorial focuses primarily on the use of standard lights; you’ll use standard lights to create a variety of shadows and caustic lighting effects. You’ll make a shadow-casting omni light, two lights to fake radiosity, and a shadow-casting spotlight with a zero multiplier to create a caustic effect. At the end of the tutorial, there are two short lessons introducing daylight and photometric lights. For further practice with daylight and photometric lights, try the Advanced Lighting tutorial.


Skill Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Time to Complete: 60 minutes (excluding radiosity calculations/renderings)

All the necessary files for this tutorial can be found on the Tutorial And Sample Files CD in the \tutorials\intro_lighting directory. Before starting the tutorials, copy the \tutorials folder to your local\3dsmax6 installation.