From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Interior Lighting and Rendering

Simulate firelight

From the course: 3ds Max and V-Ray: Interior Lighting and Rendering

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Simulate firelight

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- [Instructor] At this point, we have our flames in place, but they're not providing enough light to really give a simulation of the room being lit by firelight, so let's add in another light using a Mesh Light. Now a Mesh Light actually uses geometry as the light source. And there's a really good piece of geometry here that we can use, and that's the fireplace glass. Now, I want to retain the original glass, but I just want to use that shape as the source of my additional firelight. So, I'm going to select this, and then do an Edit + Clone, now we're going to clone it as a copy. Now the name of the original object is FP_Glass001. I'm going to change this to FP_GlassLIGHT, and that will tell me that this is the light mesh. Now notice how when I get this second piece of glass in there, that the fireplace dims a little bit, and we need to edit this light just a bit. Now I want this light to be just slightly bigger than the original fireplace glass, so that way it emits light into the room. So, I'm going to cast a light from just outside of the fireplace glass. So we're going to keep this selected, and under Modifiers, I'm going to go into Mesh Editing, and we're going to just drop an Edit Poly on there. And then let's just go into vertices, and I'm going to select the vertices on the right, move 'em out just a little bit. Same for the ones on the left. I'm just going to move it out past that fireplace glass. And then the same in the front. So now I've made this particular piece of geometry slightly bigger than the original fireplace glass. Now, we need to turn this into a Mesh Light. We can do this by going into Create, Lights, V-Ray, Mesh Light. Now just click somewhere in the scene, and it will bring up this kind of helper object here. And this is what's called a V-Ray light, and so let's go ahead and change that to call V-Ray Light Fireplace. And that's a Mesh Light. Now we could've created this in the Creation panel, as well. Now, the one thing about the Mesh Light is that we do need to pick it, so I'm going to select Pick Mesh, hover over that fireplace light there, and now, notice how the scene changes. And now, this light is attached to that second mesh. If I go into an IPR, by going into Render Setup, you'll see what happens. Now, that light is casting into the room. Now obviously, that's not what we want. We want to make sure that we keep this light selected. First thing I want to do is just make it invisible. Now when I make it invisible, notice how the light dims a little bit, and also I don't want it to effect reflections, which basically effect that fireplace. When it turn both of those off, you'll start to see how the light is effecting the room. Now, this particular light is way too bright, and it's the wrong color. Firelight is a little bit more red, so let's go ahead and find a color that's kind of like a red, or reddish-orange. And now, once I have that color, I can now start to dial down my multiplier. So I'm going to dial that down quite a bit, to maybe about two or three, and what you can see now is I'm getting kind of this warm glow in the room from the fireplace. And this a characteristic of light that I'm really not going to get from the flames alone. So this is a really good little helper for the light in the room. So remember, a Mesh Light can simulate the light coming from a piece of geometry, either the geometry itself, or a copy of that geometry.

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