Daylight Systems

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a method of creating a quick scene with accurate lighting by the use of something called a Daylight System. Easily mistaken for an actual light, this system is used to represent actual atmospheric daytime lighting based on the good old planet earth, and anywhere on it.

First, we'll need a quick and simple scene in order to light, so let's make ourselves a fast yet pretty darn good looking ocean horizon scene.

Start a new file in 3DS Max, and create a plane in your top viewport.

I have made mine right in the middle of our virtual space and given it a Length and width of 1000.0 ... it is going to represent the ocean after all and the ocean is a rather big place.

Next I will position my prospective viewport to my liking, and create a camera for the scene by pressing Ctrl+C. with my perspective viewport selected.

Then in my side viewport I'll adjust the camera's position to my liking. I think We'll make this one low to the water.

Now let's just use a quick Arch and Design material to make our ocean look less red, and more ... oceany.

Open your Material Editor (M), and select an empty material slot. Then click on the material type button, usually defaulted to Standard, and from the resulting list find and select Arch and Design (mi). It is important to note here that this is a mental ray texture set, so if you don't have Mental Ray selected as your renderer you might want to do that now. If you don't know how to do that, then you might want to back up and find a basic tutorial on where to find and change those renderer settings.

The Arch & Design (mi) materials have some great templates to get you started in creating textures, the one we are going to use you can find in the Templates drop down menu, it is labeled Water, Reflective Surface.

This is a great texture for the surface of water oriented things like rivers and oceans and lakes. It allows for all the reflectivity of a watery surface, without letting you see what's beneath it, and since we don't plan on modeling the entire ocean floor for this, it works great for us.

It works much the same way as our standard textures do, i.e. changing the diffuse color will let you change the main color of the object or adding an image or procedural map to the channel box will let you insert other images.

Change the color of your water if you like, you can always revisit this later on once we get the lighting set up in our scene. If you render right now, you probably won't see anything, reflective surface, no lights, and a default black background will show up (surprise!) as just black.

Scroll down in your Arch and Design water material settings until you find "Special Purpose Maps".

In here is where you will find our bump map, and we can make some setting changes.

Click on the channel box next to the Bump setting, it should say (Ocean (lume)) for the bump map, and is a procedural map for creating waves on the surface of our water.

Because our camera is so close to the surface of the water, lets reduce the size of the waves a bit in order to get more of them in our camera view. I have used 3.0 for Largest, and 0.2 for smallest.

Now you can exit out of your material editor, we are ready to shine some light on the subject.

You might think you know where we are headed and are now searching through the lights in the creation tab looking for the Daylight System, if this is the case you would be entirely wrong. We are going to add light to our scene next, but the Daylight System is more than just a light. So in order to find it, you have to move past the lights on the create tab and move all the way over to the far edge to find the systems button.

Click the Daylight system button here, and then when the popup menu shows up, answer Yes to its question about using Photographic Exposure Control.

We can use the Exposure Control settings to adjust the lighting of our scene even further later on.

In your top view, click and drag to create what looks like a compass rose showing the north, ease, south, west points on a map.

When you see your compass rose clearly, let go of the mouse button and then drag out the rest of the system. This next part is basically the sun.

In my side view I can see how far up I place the icon, it really doesn't matter as this system will simulate the sun's distance from earth regardless of how far up you put the icon (see, not a typical light!)

When you have a sun icon on your screen to your liking, click the left mouse button again to end the Daylight system creation.

Then with the Sun icon still selected, go on over to your Modify tab to adjust settings!

At the top of the settings you'll see your Daylight Parameters with a couple of dropdown menus.

Set the Sunlight dropdown to use mr Sun (mr stands for mental ray)

And the Skylight to use mr Sky.

The moment you select mr Sky from the second dropdown menu, you should see a popup asking you if you would also like to use the mr Physical Sky map for the environment, answer yes to this.

We can then go to your Perspective (or Camera) viewport and show this change right in our viewports.

Press Alt+B to bring up the Viewport background settings dialogue box.

Check the box here that says Use Environment Background.

and here that says Display Background and then click on OK.

I am using 3DS Max 2010 for this one and my real time renderer in my camera viewport shows up white.

We can fix this by changing our viewport to allow it to use Hardware Shaders. Hit Shift +F3.

This will use your computers graphics card to power the viewport, and show a bit more lighting in our scene, as well as our new mr Physical Sky background map, you'll notice the +HW show up in your viewport title for Hardware.

Now we are getting somewhere, our scene is actually starting to look like... well, a horizon line anyhow! Try a render, and see what you get.

not bad, but we still have some work to do obviously. We have an icky brown line across our horizon for one.

Let's go back to our Modify tab and dig back into the settings of our daylight system. Scroll down until you see the mr Sky Parameters.

Here we can change how bright our skylight is, but increasing the Multiplier a bit.We can also turn our icky brown horizon line into something else, clouds in the distance perhaps?

In the advanced parameters we can adjust where our horizon line is located, by changing it to a negative 0.1 I can successfully move the horizon line below where my ocean plane is eliminating it entirely.

If you want clouds in the distance perhaps you should leave the height alone and try increasing the blur value to soften the horizon lines edges a little more. I have gone ahead and gotten rid of my horizon by moving it into the negatives and out of my frame.

Changing the Red/Blue Tint: and the Saturation will decrease the realistic, but might help make your sky and colors a bit more vibrant and artistic.

I have set my Red/Blue Ting to a negative 0.2, and my saturation up to 1.5.

Let's see the difference our minor settings changes have had here by doing another render.

not bad eh! Now it's a beautiful clear blue sunny day! Now that we've got this down maybe we can revisit our Water's diffuse color.

By adjusting the Diffuse color swatch back in our material editor for our waves, we can deepen the water's color to perhaps a dark blue, or indigo shade, giving a bit more contrast to our sky and water.

Looking pretty good, lets now go to our Render Setup and adjust some of our antialiasing options to smooth out our rather pixilated waves.

Hit F10 to view your render setup.

click on the Renderer tab in the render setup window.

Change the Samples per pixel to something higher

I have changed my Min. to 1, and Max. to 64. this will increase render times but it will make our waves look a lot smoother.

I have also selected Mitchell as my Filter type, I find it works a bit nicer for scenery.

now the waves off in the distance don't look so scratchy.

I think in order to see the true atmospheric lighting, and reflective nature of our ocean scene we should add something to the water.

Instantly a silly teapot adds some interest to our scene, we can see all the subtle changes of our daylight system as well as the great reflective nature of the water and waves.

In essence, that's it, no more is necessary. However, it barely truly scratches the surface of what this system is capable of.

So let's have some fun with it.

At the top of the Daylight System settings, just under our initial drop boxes that we changed, you will see the position settings.

Here you can click on Setup... and dictate exactly what day, time, and place on the planet that you wish to simulate.

Or you can click on Manual and adjust the position of the sun yourself.

Select Manual now and then go to your viewport and move the sun icon down towards the horizon line in your scene and see how the Daylight system compensates all on its own.

From the appearance of the sun itself on the horizon to the change in colors and shadows.

By scrolling down and once again adjusting the Red/Blue Tint: and the Saturation numbers, we can change the colors of our sunset even more dramatically.

Set the Red/blue Tint: to a positive 1.0 this time for a more redish tone.

And the Saturation all the way to 2.0.

If we return to our render Setup by hitting F10, we can go back to the Renderer tab and scroll down till you see the camera shaders.

By checking the box labeled Output we apply the default Glare camera shader to the scene, which will add a nice bright horizon effect to our sun.

and make the reflective light on the waves really sparkle.

By going back to the settings for our Daylight System and finding the mr Sky Parameters once again we can add more.

We can once again increase the output of light from our skylight

Make sure Haze Driven is selected in the Sky Model Drop down menu.

Increase the haze number to 2.0

and reduce the visibility distance to something much smaller like 50.0.

We can get a foggy, hazy look to our sunset scene.

If we change our Red/Blue Tint and Saturation yet again, we can remove the colored light from the scene completely.

Now let's press 8 on our keyboards to open up the Environment and Effects panel.

Remember when we first made the daylight system, and we answered yes to the question about Photographic Exposure Controls?

This is where it added that for us, and this is where we can adjust the color and light of this scene even further.

Scroll down to see the settings for mr photographic exposure controls.

Here you can adjust the exposure control for Color Saturation, Whitepoint, and Vignetting, among other things.

Change the Saturation to 1.2Reduce the Whitepoint to something below 3000. Increase the Vignetting to 10 or so

And suddenly we have turned out daylight system into some foggy moonlit night scene!

This should give you a good start in experimenting with the daylight system and all that comes along with it.

Play with the settings in the daylight system, and the photographic exposure control, and render setup to discover more about lighting an exterior scene.