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Cross-Reference

More on applying texture maps is covered in Chapter 17, “Adding Material Details with Maps.” •

Displaying lights and shadows in the viewports

Options for enabling lighting and shadow effects within the viewports are located in the Shading viewport label menu. By default, both shadows and ambient occlusion are enabled when the Realistic shading mode is selected, but you can disable them using the toggle menu options under the Lighting and Shadows menu. There is also an option to Illuminate the scene using Scene Lights or Default Lights. Figure 2.12 shows an example of viewport shadows and Ambient Occlusion.

FIGURE 2.12

Viewport Shading shown with shadows enabled

Ambient Occlusion is a lighting effect that adds to the realism of a scene by making objects cast shadows on surrounding objects based on how they block the light. Objects that are close to one another spread a soft shadow onto nearby objects. Figure 2.13 gives a good example. Notice how the columns cast a light shadow onto the walls and onto the areas around the column caps.

FIGURE 2.13

Ambient Occlusion can often be used as an alternative to full shadows

Caution

Displaying shadows in the viewport requires Direct3D 9.0 to be installed on your system, and your video card must support Shader Model 2.0 or Shader Model 3.0. If your computer doesn't support either of these Shader models, then the options will be disabled in the viewport shading label menu and in the Viewport Configuration dialog box. You can check the capabilities of your video card using the Help⇒Diagnose Video Hardware command. •

Configuring viewport lighting and shadows

The Viewport Configuration dialog box includes a number of settings for the viewport lighting and shadows in the Visual Style & Appearance panel, shown in Figure 2.14. This panel includes options to illuminate the scene with Default lights (either one or two) or with Scene lights, just like the viewport Shading label menu. The one-light option creates a single light positioned behind the viewer and at an angle to the scene. Scenes with one light update more quickly than scenes with two lights.

The Default Lighting toggle deactivates your current lights and uses the default lights. This option can be helpful when you're trying to view objects in a dark setting because the default lighting illuminates the entire scene without requiring you to remove or turn off lights. This dialog box also includes options for enabling Highlights and displaying light from the selected lights.

FIGURE 2.14

The Lighting and Shadows panel includes default settings for displaying interactive lights and shadows in the viewport.

Note

If you are not using the Nitrous display drivers, then the configuration options for lighting and shadows are different. •

The Lighting and Shadows Quality slider lets you select from several different quality settings by dragging the slider. The options range from Point Lights/Hard Shadows and Point Lights/Soft-Edge Shadows on the left through 0.125X-Very Low to 16X-Very High Quality on the right. The rightmost options can take longer to render and use area lights to improve the quality.

Beneath the Quality slider are options to enable or disable Shadows and Ambient Occlusion. You also have options to adjust the Intensity/Fade value for shadows and the Radius and Intensity/Fade amount of the Ambient Occlusion effect. These values are used to override the Viewport Shadow Intensity to dim the shadows if they are too dark. The Radius value sets how close objects need to be in order to be included in the ambient occlusion solution.

New Feature

Using and configuring viewport lighting options have been simplified in 3ds Max 2012. You no longer need to enable Hardware Rendering to see viewport shadows. •

To enable and configure lighting and shadows in the viewports, follow these steps:

1. Open the Foot bones.max file from the Chap 02 directory on the CD.

This file includes a set of foot bones created by