3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [245]
Note
Many of these controls are identical for viewports displaying lights or cameras. •
If you hold down the Ctrl key while using the Light Hotspot or Falloff buttons, Max maintains the distance between the hotspot and falloff cones. Holding down the Alt key causes the size to change at a much slower rate. The Hotspot cone cannot grow any larger than the Falloff cone, but if you hold down the Shift key, then trying to make the size of the hotspot larger than the falloff causes both to increase, and vice versa.
You can constrain any light movements to a single axis by holding down the Shift key. The Ctrl key causes the movements to increase rapidly.
For Free lights, an invisible target is determined by the distance computed from the other light properties. You can use the Shift key to constrain rotations to be vertical or horizontal.
Note
You can undo changes in the normal viewports using the Views⇒Undo command, but you undo light viewport changes with the regular Edit⇒Undo command. •
Tutorial: Lighting a lamp
To practice using lights, you'll try to get a lamp model to work as it should.
To add a light to a lamp model, follow these steps:
1. Open the Lamp.max file from the Chap 20 directory on the CD.
This file includes a lamp mesh surrounded by some plane objects used to create the walls and floor. The lamp model was created by Zygote Media. It looks like a standard living room lamp that you could buy in any department store.
2. Select the Create⇒Lights⇒Standard Lights⇒Omni menu command, and click in any viewport.
3. Use the Select and Move transform button (W) to position the light object inside the lamp's light bulb.
The resulting image is shown in Figure 20.7. Notice that the light intensity is greater at places closer to the light.
FIGURE 20.7
The rendered lighted-lamp image
Altering Light Parameters
Lights affect every object in a scene and can really make or break a rendered image, so it shouldn't be surprising that each light comes with many controls and parameters. Several different rollouts work with lights.
If you're looking for a light switch to turn lights on and off, look no further than the Modify panel. When a light is selected, several different rollouts appear. The options contained in these rollouts enable you to turn the lights on and off, select a light color and intensity, and determine how a light affects object surfaces.
General parameters
The Light Type drop-down list in the General Parameters rollout lets you change the type of light instantly, so that you can switch from Omni light to Spotlight with little effort. You can also switch between targeted and untargeted lights. To the right of the Targeted option is the distance in scene units between the light and the target. This feature provides an easy way to look at the results of using a different type of light. When you change the type of light, you lose the settings for the previous light.
The General Parameters rollout also includes some settings for shadows. Shadows can be easily turned on or off. In this rollout, you can defer to the global settings by selecting the Use Global Settings option. This option helps to maintain consistent settings across several lights. It applies the same settings to all lights, so that changing the value for one light changes that same value for all lights that have this option selected.
You can also select from a drop-down list whether the shadows are created using Area Shadows, a Shadow Map, regular or advanced raytraced shadows, or a mental ray shadow map. A new rollout appears, depending on the selection that you make.
The Exclude button opens the Exclude/Include dialog box, where you can select objects to be included or excluded from illumination and/or shadows. The pane on the left includes a list of all the current objects in the scene. To exclude objects from being lit, select the Exclude option, select the objects to be excluded from the pane on the left, and click the double-arrow icon pointing to the right to move the objects to the pane