From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

Creating photometric lights - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Creating photometric lights

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- [Instructor] For artificial lighting or theatrical lighting, you'll probably want to use the photometric light type in 3dsMax. It's a physically accurate light type and it is compatible with Arnold and almost every renderer out there nowadays. In this course, I want to try to be renderer agnostic as much as possible. That means the features that I show you should be compatible with other renderers besides the stock renderer included with 3dsMax, which is Arnold. So let's take a look at our available light types. Before we do, I want to point out that in this scene I've turned off all lights and I've got my previously created viewport shading preset. It's called Standard All Lights. And because I've enabled that preset, there's no light in the scene and we get perfectly black surfaces everywhere. The only way we're able to see anything right now is because I've enabled edged faces with F4. If I turn that off, all those surfaces are completely black. This is a good place to start when you create lights so that you're not distracted by any other factors such as the environment. I've got my environment set to completely black. We are seeing the viewport background here, but it's not contributing to the light in the scene. Alright, I'll turn my edged faces back on with F4. Let's go over to the Create panel to the Lights subpanel. We have a pull down list from which we can choose different types of lights. We have Photometric, Standard and Arnold. The Arnold light is only available in Arnold, and if we try to render this in another renderer, it won't work at all. And if you want to learn about the Arnold light, which is very powerful, you'll want to check out my course, "3dsMax: Rendering with Arnold." The standard lights are not physically based. These are a legacy shading model from the 1990s. And the standard lights are only useful when rendering in the Quicksilver Hardware Renderer or the Legacy Scan Line renderer. Physically-based renderers, such as Arnold, do not support the standard lights at all because they're not physically based. I'll go up to Photometric. There's really only one type of photometric light object. It can be configured to represent many different light sources, such as a point light, an area light, a spotlight, and so on. And just like cameras, photometric lights can be targeted or free and the target can be turned on or off at any time. So although we have two buttons here, target light and free light, they actually create the same thing. And the only difference is one of them has a target turned on and the other one has it turned off. There's also a button for a sun positioner. That's for a daylight system. We'll be taking a look at that later. Generally, for any artificial or theatrical light, you'll want to start from a photometric light and only if you cannot achieve the effect that you want should you move on to a renderer-specific light, such as the Arnold Light. I'm going to create a free light. Click the button Free light, and I get a pop-up dialogue. "Photometric Light Creation, you are creating a photometric light. It is recommended that you use the physical camera exposure control. Would you like to change this now?" Hmm, well, what's this all about? Exposure control is a method to map the physically simulated light intensities to the brightness values of rendered pixels. It's very similar to the iris aperture and the sensitivity settings on a real-world camera. This dialogue is asking, "Do we want to enable exposure control or not?" And we're going to be looking at this later. For now, I'm just going to say, "No, I do not want to enable exposure control." And with that dialogue out of the way, now I can actually create my light. I'll just click in this perspective view on the ground plane. And the light is created. It's created right on the construction plane of the current viewport. And it takes a moment for that light to compile against all the material shaders in the view. I talked about this in a previous movie, the viewport renderer needs to do some work in order to make the shaders real-time, to make them update as we move around. And, so, every time you create a light or you change a shading mode, the scene needs to recompile. And that may take a moment. And if it doesn't update right away and you see those checker patterns everywhere, then you may need to navigate in the viewport in order to refresh that view. Okay, so I've created that light and I'll right click to exit light creation, grab the move tool and move the light upward. And we see we're getting some illumination in our scene. Okay, we've created a default photometric light, and in the next movie we'll look at setting its intensity in color.

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