From the course: Learning 3ds Max 2020

Natural daylight with Sun Positioner - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: Learning 3ds Max 2020

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Natural daylight with Sun Positioner

- [Instructor] Having realistic, natural daylight is super easy using the Physical Sun and Sky Environment. And it is controlled via the Sun Positioner helper. We've got a scene here with no lights and no exposure control. And if we go into the Viewport menus and turn on Active Shade using Arnold, we'll see the result with no lighting. We have just default lighting in this shot. All right, I'll turn that back off again and create the Sun Positioner. That'll be found in the Create panel in the Lights section under Photometric, and here's Sun Positioner. Click on that and then go over to the top view and click and drag to create the compass rose. Release the mouse and then drag to set the orientation of that compass rose. If we want north pointing in the positive y axis of the world, then in the top view we'll move the cursor up to above the compass rose. Click to set that orientation. And then move the mouse without holding it down to set the distance of the Sun Positioner. And this distance doesn't affect the lighting. It's merely for visual effect in the viewport so we can kind of get a sense of where the light is coming from. Once you set that distance, click to complete that Sun Positioner object and then right click to exit out of Sun Positioner Creation. With that Sun Positioner created, two things have happened. One, we now have a Physical Sun and Sky Environment installed. And two, Exposure Control has been enabled. Let's take a look. If we go into the Rendering menu and go to Environment or Exposure Control, they'll both take us to the same place, we see in the Environment tab we have an Environment Map. And additionally, under Exposure Control it has been set to Physical Camera Exposure Control with an Exposure Value of 15. Let's see what that looks like. If we go over to our viewport and enable Active Shade using Arnold once again, and now we see a very dim shot. And that's because the Default Exposure value is 15. And that should be a photometrically accurate value, but unfortunately Arnold wants to see an Exposure Value of 6 or so. So we'll need to adjust this. Bring the Global Exposure value down to 6. And once again if you need to, right click in that viewport to update it. And now we can see that we've got a really bright outdoor shot. If we scroll into our Physical Camera Exposure Control settings once again we can set this to a linear response curve, Highlights of .15, Midtones of .55, and Shadows of 0, and having done that we probably want to brighten this up just a little bit. We can reduce the Exposure Value down to 5. Or maybe even 4. It looks like 4 is overexposed. So we'll set the Exposure Value back to 5. And again, if it doesn't update we can right click in the view and force it to update. We've got our exposure set more or less correctly. Let's now play with the Sun Positioner. It is still selected, actually. And we can go over to the Modify panel. And we can adjust the position of the sun in the sky using the Date and Time, the Weather File, or Manually. The default is Date and Time, and we can go in here, and for example, plug in a certain location in the world, simply by clicking on Location on Earth here, and then from the Map choosing some place on the map like Portland, Oregon, and then set the date and time, and we will get the exact result that you would see at that place in the world at that particular date and time. If we wanted a manual control, we would switch this over to Manual, scroll down to the bottom and we have Azimuth and Altitude. Azimuth is the rotational angle around the compass rose and altitude is the position above the horizon line. So we can click on these spinners and drag around and see what that does. We can minimize Environment and Effects and take a look at that Sun Positioner and see how this is affecting the lighting. If we bring the Azimuth around to let's say 220 something degrees, the light's going to come from camera left. If we bring the Azimuth to a lower value, like 120 or something like that, then the lighting's coming from camera right. And then the altitude is the height above the horizon line. If we bring the altitude value down to something like 35 degrees then we're going to get the slanting rays of late afternoon, bring it down really low to something like 20 degrees, and we have a classic golden hour shot. This is also providing an environment backdrop, and it's renderable. If we orbit around with alt and middle mouse in our perspective view and look up we can see that we've got a renderable sky background and actually a sun there in the sky as well. Okay, let's undo that rotation. We can go into the viewport label perspective and choose undo. And finally we can control some more parameters for the environment and that's done through the physical sun and sky environment node. I've got my Environment and Effects dialog minimized. I'll bring that back up again. And at the top we have the Environment Map. Let's access those parameters. We need to open the Material Editor as well. And then drag the Environment Map slot over into the Material Editor view and choose Instance, and then double click on that node, and we have some more parameters in here. So we can take a look at what these do. For example, we can change the Global Intensity of the light and we can drop it down to maybe .5. And now it's dimmed down. Or we can set it to a value of 2 and brighten it up. Likewise, there are some parameters here for Saturation, and maybe changing the size of the sun in the sky and so on. We've also got a haze parameter here. It's going to affect the lighting. But you can play around with those and see what they do. Essentially that's how you would adjust the Physical Sun and Sky to get different lighting effects, and that's how to use the Sun Positioner to provide a realistic daylight solution.

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