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in the Lighting Analysis Assistant dialog box includes a feature to Create Image Overlay Render Effect. This button adds a render effect to the scene that displays the lighting levels for the entire scene. When the scene is rendered, lighting values are displayed in the Rendered Frame Window, as shown in Figure 45.17.

FIGURE 45.17

The Lighting Analysis Assistant renders the scene with lighting values shown.

Summary

Advanced lighting offers a new way to shine lights on your scenes. With these features, many new lighting options are available. Advanced lighting enables two global illumination methods: light tracing and radiosity. In this chapter, you accomplished the following:

• Enabled advanced lighting

• Discovered light tracing

• Set local advanced lighting settings

• Discovered radiosity

• Used the Subdivide modifier

• Set local and global advanced lighting settings

• Used advanced lighting materials and the Lighting Analysis Assistant

The next chapter deals with fire and smoke and other Atmospheric effects. It also deals with the various Render Effects that Max can generate.

Chapter 46: Using Atmospheric and Render Effects

IN THIS CHAPTER

Using Exposure Controls

Using Atmospheric Apparatus gizmos to position atmospheric effects

Using the Fire effect

Working with fog

Adding render effects

Using the Lens Effects to add glows, rays, and streaks

Understanding the other types of render effects

In the real world, an environment of some kind surrounds all objects. The environment does much to set the ambiance of the scene. For example, an animation set at night in the woods has a very different environment than one set at the horse races during the middle of the day. Max includes dialog boxes for setting the color, background images, and lighting environment; these features can help define your scene.

This chapter covers Exposure Controls, atmospheric effects, including the likes of clouds, fog, and fire. These effects can be seen only when the scene is rendered.

Max also has a class of effects that you can interactively render to the Rendered Frame window without using any post-production features, such as the Video Post dialog box. These effects are called render effects. Render effects can save you lots of time that you would normally spend rendering an image, touching it up, and repeating the process again and again.

Using Exposure Controls

The Exposure Control rollout of the Environment panel lets you control output levels and color rendering ranges. You can access the Environment panel from the Rendering⇒Environment menu command or by pressing the 8 key. Controlling the exposure of film is a common procedure when working with film and can result in a different look for your scene. Enabling the Exposure Controls can add dynamic range to your rendered images that is more comparable to what the eyes actually see. If you've worked with a Histogram in Photoshop, then you'll understand the impact that the Exposure Controls can have. The default selection is Automatic Exposure Control.

The Active option lets you turn this feature on and off. The Process Background and Environment Maps option causes the exposure settings to affect the background and environment images. When this option is disabled, only the scene objects are affected by the exposure control settings. The Exposure Control rollout also includes a Render Preview button that displays the rendered scene in a tiny pane. The preview pane is small, but for most types of exposure control settings it is enough. When you click the Render Preview button, the scene is rendered. This preview is then automatically updated whenever a setting is changed.

Automatic, Linear, and Logarithmic Exposure Control

Selecting Automatic Exposure Control from the drop-down list automatically adjusts your rendered output to be closer to what your eyes can detect. Monitors are notoriously bad at reducing the dynamic range of the colors in your rendered image. This setting provides the needed adjustments to match the expanded