From the course: 3ds Max 2019: Advanced Lighting

Projection with a photometric projector map - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2019: Advanced Lighting

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Projection with a photometric projector map

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- [Instructor] 3DS Max photometric lights give us the ability to project an image or pattern onto the scene, and that's called a projector map. It works best with a spotlight distribution, because we can constrain the map to the radius of the spotlight's falloff. And I've got a spotlight here in the scene already, and it's the only light in my scene. I'll select it and go over to the modify panel, and as I said, we've got a spotlight distribution type. I've chosen the shape to be point here, in shape area shadows. And that will make the image that I'm projecting more crisp. Scroll down a little bit farther in the modify panel, and open up advanced effects, and you've got a slot for your projector map. Click the button and in the material map browser, we're going to choose a bitmap, but we really could choose anything. Double click on bitmap, and in our selected bitmap image file dialog, in our current project scene assets images, we'll select UPC04-25 square dot png, and click open. It's now been assigned as the projector map. Let's load it into the material editor, launch the material editor, and drag that button over into the material editor view, choose instance. And double click on the bitmap node to load its parameters. We can also double click on the icon to make it larger. And we see a decent sized preview here. Notice that it is a perfect square. My file is actually a square. We can view the image directly by clicking on this button. And I've placed my UPC code onto a perfectly square canvas. Because the photometric spotlight does not allow us to control the aspect ratio of the projector map, the map has to be on a square canvas. But that's really the only restriction. The map could be a procedural, it could be a sequence of images, or really anything you want. Also keep in mind that the radius of the spotlight's falloff will touch the edges of the bitmap, and that'll be tiled one unit across by default. And we need to make sure that we have a bit of a gap here, imagine that you've got a circle, and you've placed the image within the boundaries of that circle. And give it a little bit of extra margin to account for the spotlight's hotspot radius, which will be a little bit inside the falloff. Alright, so I've staged that up, and we're ready to do our rendering. Click render production. Here's the full screen render of the projector map image, and that's how to apply a projector map to modulate the brightness and color of a photometric spotlight.

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