8

Placing Lights and Cameras 7
Placing Lights and Cameras
You place lig hts and cameras to complete your
scene in much t he same way lights and cameras are
placed on a movie set prior to filming.
Lights and cameras placed to compose a scene
The resulting scene
Default L ighting
Default lig hting evenly illuminates the entire scene.
Such lighting is useful while modeling, but it is not
especially ar t istic or realistic.
Placing Lights
You create and place lights from the Lights category
of the Create panel when you are ready to get more
specific about the lighting in your scene.
The program includes the following standard light
types: omni, spot, and directional lights. You can
setalighttoanycolorandevenanimatethecolor
to simulate dimming or color-shifting lights. All
of these lights can cast shadow s, project maps, and
use volumetric effects.
See
Guidelines for Lighting (page 2–1134) .
Photometr i c Li ghts
Photometr ic lights (p age 2–1155) provide you
with the ability to work more accurately and
intuitively using real-world lighting units (lumens
and candelas). Photometric lights also support
industry-standard photometric file formats (
IES
(page 2–1172)
, CIBSE (page 3–1015) , LTL I (p a ge
3–1058)
) so that you can mo del the charac ter istics
of real-world manufactured luminaires, or even
drag ready-to-use luminaires from the Web.
Used in conjunction with the 3ds Max
radiosity
solution (page 3–50)
,photometriclightsletyou
evaluate more accurately (both physically and
quantitatively) the lighting performance of your
scene.
Photometric lights are available from the Create
panel > Lights drop-down list.
Day li ght S y stem
The Daylight system (page 1–394) combines
sunlight (page 3–1112) and skylight (page
3–1106)
to create a unified system that follows
the geographically correct angle and movement
of the sun over the earth at a given location. You
can choose location, date, time, and compass
orient ation. You can also animate the date and
time.Thissystemissuitableforshadowstudiesof
proposed and existing struc tures.
V iewing Lighting Effects in the Scene
When you place lights in a scene, the default
lighting tur ns off and the scene is illuminated only
by the lights you create. The illumination you