Let There Be Light

For this post I will be commenting on another new technique I have learnt about which is the daylight system within 3D's Max.

Before I started animating my scene's, there was something missing that was very important, which was scenary. My models just had a black background and didn't look very professional so this needed changing. Firstly I went about trying to change the environment, but I could't change the properties to what I wanted so I tried looking at the daylight system, which I had never used before but I wanted to try and expand my knowledge and try using the system.

There are many properties to change on the daylight system, for example you can set the exact time and date that you want for the setting, as 3D's Max has a large database with where the sun was on that day at that time which I found very clever. 

This shows some of the settings that you can change for the daylight system.

There are many other properties that you can change but in order for the daylight system to work in the render you need to choose mental ray renderer, this is so the software knows that it has to render the daylight system, and you start rendering and realise that the daylight system isnt working.

This is where you need to change the settings for the daylight system, within the render settings near the bottom.

Once you are happy with your settings and have chosen the right options the daylight system should hopefuly make a big difference to your work, even though it is only a small part within the model.

    

This shows the ship within the daylight system, it seems dark but this is because I have set the daylight system to early in the morning when the sun is at its lowest.