From the course: 3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Constructing a lighting assembly

Constructing a lighting assembly - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Constructing a lighting assembly

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- [Instructor] An assembly is a special type group specifically designed for lighting instruments, such as this modern desk lamp here. The difference between an assembly and a group is that an assembly has a head object, which can hold attributes or parameters, whereas a group does not have any attributes or parameters and cannot hold any parameters. And this is useful, especially in a situation where you want to be able to drive the parameters of a light, such as this photometric rectangle light, and you want to be able to control those parameters directly from the root level of the group or assembly. So you can't do that with a group, although you can do it with other helper objects, such as a point helper. The assembly has some of that functionality already built into it, so it's convenient in situations such as this. An optional part of that process is to set up an inverse kinematics chain to post the light, and I…

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