The substance of painting is light

When you work in 3ds max, its easy to forget about the default lights that are at work. In all the previous images I have posted, the lights in the scene have been the default lights in 3ds Max.  Thast all good and well for some situations, but for more detailed work you should create your own lights.

The subject of last weeks education was just that, lighting. I learned about standard lights and Photometric lights and all the cool effects you can achieve using these. I have touched upon this earlier in 3ds max, but I have not taken the time to learn so much about it – so this introduction was great.

This has to be one of my favorite things about lighting so far, loading presets. There are a lot of these presets available for download on the internet, lots and lots to resemble real lightbulbs, for example like the one above your bathroom mirror.

Reflections

I also learned a bit about reflections, and some about materials to add reflections in the material I are creating – using HDRI. Renderings without any reflections seems unnatural so I am glad I learned this now so that I can use it for my project.

Using the Arch & Design material that is included with the Mental Ray renderer, its easy to create materials that appear quite realistic, and I am allowed to use this for my project – neat! I’m going to be playing around with this for some time, that’s for sure!

Drawings of the week

Some of us in class wanted to get more drawing lessons, as the teacher who used to have an hour of drawing with us each day stopped doing so. We went to ask him if there were any way we could get some more lessons in drawing – which he was glad to do.

Now every Wednesday we have an hour long drawing sessions each week, which the school invited everyone to join – fun to see how our initiative spread to the whole school!