3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [476]
To light a house interior with radiosity, follow these steps:
1. Open the House interior.max file from the Chap 45 directory on the CD.
2. Open the Advanced Lighting panel with the Rendering⇒Radiosity menu command (or press the 9 key). Select Radiosity from the drop-down list in the Select Advanced Lighting rollout.
3. In the Radiosity Processing Parameters rollout, set the Refine Iterations value to 2 and click the Start button to have Max compute the radiosity solution.
4. In the Rendering Parameters rollout, enable the Render Direct Illumination, the Regather Indirect Illumination, and the Adaptive Sampling options. Then click the Render button to begin the rendering process.
Figure 45.13 shows the finished rendered house interior. Notice that all surfaces are well lit even though the scene has a limited number of lights.
Cross-Reference
This same house interior is rendered with mental ray in Chapter 47, “Rendering with mental ray and iray.” •
FIGURE 45.13
The radiosity solution for this scene adds to the lighting levels for the entire room.
Using Local and Global Advanced Lighting Settings
Just like with the Light Tracer, you can set advanced lighting settings locally for specific objects using the Object Properties dialog box, opened with the Edit⇒Object Properties menu command. This dialog box includes an Advanced Lighting panel, and several of the settings are specific to radiosity.
For the selected objects, you can specify whether they Cast Shadows and Receive Illumination. For a radiosity solution, you also can select to enable or disable Diffuse, Specular, Exclude from Regathering, and Subdividing. The Radiosity Refine Iterations value lets you set the number of iterations for the current selection. Think of Refine Iterations as the quality setting. You can set it for all objects or just for the selected object. It works by comparing the variance between adjacent faces.
If any light objects are selected, you can select to exclude them from radiosity processing or to store the illumination values with the mesh.
The Preference Settings dialog box also includes a Radiosity panel. Using this panel, shown in Figure 45.14, you can set the advanced lighting settings that apply to all objects globally.
In the Radiosity panel of the Preference Settings dialog box is an option to Display Reflectance & Transmittance Information. If this option is enabled, this information (average and maximum percent values) appears directly below the sample slots. You also can select to have the radiosity solution displayed in the viewports and to automatically process any refine iterations noted in the Object Properties dialog box for a given object. Radiosity processing includes a couple of warning dialog boxes that appear—one when the current solution is reset, and another to update the solution when the Start button is clicked. You can disable both of these warnings. The final option is to save the radiosity solution with the Max file. This slightly increases the file size, but it doesn't require that you recalculate the radiosity solution when the file is opened again.
FIGURE 45.14
Use the Radiosity panel of the Preference Settings dialog box to set global parameters.
Working with Advanced Lighting Materials
Applying an advanced lighting solution can have a direct impact on the materials in the scene. The Material Editor includes two materials that are useful for working with advanced lighting: Advanced Lighting Override and Lightscape materials.
Advanced Lighting Override
The Advanced Lighting Override material type includes material parameters that override the global Advanced Lighting solution. These parameters let you set the amount of Reflectance, Color Bleed, Transmittance, Luminance, and Bump Map Scale that the material uses. This offers a way to make a specific material have its own defined lighting parameters.
Note
The Advanced Lighting Override material does