9

Placing Lights and Cameras 7
Placing Lights and Ca mera s
You place lights and cameras to complete your
scene in much the same way lights and cameras are
placed on a movie set prior to filming.
Lights and cameras placed to compose a scene
The resulting scene
Default Lighting
Default lighting evenly illuminates the entire scene.
Such lighting is useful while modeling, but it is not
especially art istic or realistic.
Placing Lights
You create and place lights from the Lights category
of the Create panel when you are ready to get more
specific about the lighting in your scene.
The program includes the follow ing standard light
types: omni, spot, and directional lights. You can
setalighttoanycolorandevenanimatethecolor
to simulate dimming or color-shifting lights. All
of these lights can cast shadows, project maps, and
use volumetric effects.
See Guidelines for Lighting (page 2–1280).
Photometr i c L ights
Photometric lights (page 2–1301) provide you
with the ability to work more accurately and
intuitively using real-world lighting units (lumens
and candelas). Photometr ic lights also suppor t
industry-standard photometric file formats (IE S
(page 2–1328), CIBSE (page 3–921), LT LI ( pag e
3–964)) s o that you can model the characteristics
of real-world manufactured luminaires, or even
drag ready-to-use luminaires from the Web.
Used in conjunction with the 3ds Max radiosity
solution (page 3–51),photometriclightsletyou
evaluate more accurately (both physically and
quantitatively) the lighting performance of your
scene.
Photometric lights are available from the Create
panel > Lights drop-down list.
Day li ght S ys tem
The Daylight system (page 1–418) combines
sunlight (page 3–1018) and skylight (page 3–1012)
to create a unified system that follows the
geographically correct angle and mo vement of
thesunovertheearthatagivenlocation. You
can choose location, date, time, and compass
orient ation. You can also animate the date and
time.Thissystemissuitableforshadowstudiesof
proposed and exist ing st ructures.
V iewing Lighting Ef fects in the S cene
When you place lights in a scene, the default
lighting turns off and the scene is illuminated only
by the lights you create. The illumination you