Datasheet

In this stage of the pipeline, the lighting workflow begins when you are texturing
your objects. You need to light your scene initially to evaluate how your textures are
progressing. However, the final lighting and look really happen after everything else is
done, and you are left to go back and forth with the render to check and recheck, fix and
refix issues that come up in the rendered images. You may even find, for example, that a
model you’ve built needs to be altered because a lighting scheme works for everything
but that model. Therefore, a back-and-forth workflow with lighting does not just apply
to texturing.
The more experience you gain with lighting, the more you will start to notice that light-
ing affects every stage of CG creation. Once you start mastering the subtleties of lighting,
and after years of modeling, you may change how you model to accommodate how you
now light. Even your animation and texturing preferences may take a back seat to how a
scene needs to be lighted.
CG is fundamentally all about light. Manipulating how light is created and reflected is
what you’re doing with CG.
Luckily, in 3ds Max, lighting is set up to mimic the behavior of real lights used in live
action (at least in principle), making the lighting process easier to use. You will learn how
to light in 3ds Max in Chapter 10, “3ds Max Lighting.”
Rendering
You’ve modeled it all, textured it, and lit your scene like a pro. Hundreds of hours and
several cases of Red Bull later, you are ready to render. Rendering is the stage where your
computer makes all the computations necessary to create images from your 3D objects.
Depending on how much stuff is in your scene, rendering may be super quick or painfully
slow. The amount of geometry (the number of polygons) you used to model, the number
and types of lights, the size of texture images, and the effects in your scene all affect render
times. When time or resources are limited, you need to build your scene intelligently so
that you don’t spend hours rendering a single frame. The more efficient your scene is, the
faster the rendering will go.
Having said that, there is really no magic formula to figure out how long is too long for
a render. Some scenes require a massive amount of time to render, for whatever reason,
and you are stuck with that—but most do not. In time you’ll be able to ascertain for your-
self how long is too long for your renders.
A good gauge for render times is to identify what computers you have to render with
and how much time you have before a project has to be completed. With a little simple
math, you can determine an acceptable render time for your scenes and adjust your qual-
ity and output settings, as well as your lighting setup, to fit within your constraints.
12 ■ chapter 1: Basic Concepts
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