An introduction to the VRayLight

- [Instructor] To start our examination of the V-Ray light in 3ds Max, we will of course need to know how we go about adding one to a scene if we are to take a look at the control set that it offers. Doing this is a pretty straight forward process, although as is often times the case in 3ds Max, we can actually add V-Ray light to our scenes in a number of ways. So, for instance from the create tab in the command panel we could come to the light section, choose the V-Ray entry in the drop down and then select the light type that we want to work with from there. Which for the purposes of this course will be the V-Ray light. We could just as easily though, come to the create menu and then from the lights and V-Ray fly outs again, choose the light type that we want to work with. Only in this instance, we do seem to have a few more choices available than is the case over in the command panel. Although this isn't actually true, because if I just go ahead and click the V-Ray light button in the command panel and then by means of left click and drag in the top view port, add one to the scene, you can see over in the command panel controls once I release the mouse button, that what we actually have done here is add a light to the scene that has a number of operating modes available, these being plane, dome, sphere, mesh and disk. All of which back in the menu fly outs are listed as separate options along with IES, the very rarely used ambient light and V-Ray Sun options. If I just go ahead and delete the light that we created though, probably the easiest way to get any V-Ray light into one of our scenes is to come over to the V-Ray tool bar and quickly select the option that we want. Now if you don't the V-Ray tool bar visible in your UI all you need do is right click in some empty tool bar space, say on the main tool bar and enable the V-Ray option that should be listed there. If you don't have the V-Ray tool bar listed, than there is a good chance that you don't have the V-Ray renderer correctly installed. After opening up the scene explorer and making sure that we have nothing selected in the scene, let's create a new layer called lights, which should automatically become the active layer as denoted by the blue-green layer stag icon. After which we can select the plan light option on the V-Ray tool bar, perform a left click and drag in the top view port somewhere over the top of the vase and flower geometry, after which we can right click in order to exit create mode. And with that we now have a V-Ray light in our scene operating in plane mode. Of course what we need to do now is make a start at understanding how the controls on the light work, so that we are then able to use it to create appropriate lighting in our scenes. For the remainder of this chapter then, what we will do is focus on the controls that are common to the V-Ray light in all of its operating modes as listed a few moment ago. Starting first of all with the intensity and color options. Let's also save what we have done here as a new 3ds Max scene file called base_02. So, that we can again work with it as we move forward in our course. Saving it into the scenes folder in our 3ds Max project of course. After which we can move on to next exercise.