when you don't use textures

[AJ]

If you are using Final Render - then run through the manual and it will detail the process of it's Global Illumination settings quite well.

For a quick setup - just make your environment colour blue (I can't remember if Final render has it's own environment colour, I've only used it a couple of times) - or create a hemisphere over your object with a blue material (with self illumination) and turn on Final Renders GI (I think it's "Alt+Shift+F" for the Render settings) and also put a light in the scene and turn it off just so you know all illumination is coming from the sphere.

Then render/fiddle and play with adding lights/changing settings.

Hope this helps,

:)

[digital god]

Actually version 1.1 of FinalRender has its own skylight feature to override the environmental light. If you are using 1.0 just make sure "Consider Background" is turned on under the Global Illumination rollout. And of course that GI is activated :)

PS.: the "Consider Background" Option is only visible if you active the "Advanced Controls" Menu wich can be done by the so named button under the GI rollout. But it is on by default anyways.

PPS.: The GI rollout can be found in the fRGlobals wich you should bind tn a button on the interface or in a quad or on a shortcut.

[Codexus]

This is exactly the question I wanted to ask. Well... except for the FinalRender part.

Oh and before I continue, I'm quite sorry to start asking annoying newbie questions on my first post. But I'm really obsessed about how to get renders that look like that.

So my understanding, is that this amazing soft lighting is the result of global illumination and more exactly sky dome lighting.

My question is can you do it with Max's default renderer or do you need to buy one of the other renderers like MentalRay or this FinalRender. I have heard of using light arrays to simulate global lighting, does that look as good ??

I'm using the demo of max that came with a french magazine this month (only 2 weeks to play with it :( ) and I'd like to see if Max is right for me. And I know I want a soft that can do that kind of renders.

Thanks a lot if you can help me :) :D

[Ilmarinen]

there is a tutorial in 3dluvr.com how to get most out of max scanline renderer.

[Codexus]

Thanks a lot :D, this site has very interesting stuff. Not exactly, the answer to my question but I spent half the night experimenting with arrays of lights and I managed to mostly get that "global illumination" look. (I used an array of 100 lights placed in a hemisphere pattern).

[xynaria]

Using the array is practically as close as you can get using the default renderer. Bear in mind that the plug in renderers with GI solutions will be bouncing the light off the objects at least once. You could try and set up additional lights to simulate this but it's quite a time consuming and tricky procedure. The Brazil renderer www.splutterfish.com is still available as a free beta if you want to try that out. It's reasonably easy to set up but rendering can take some time so don't for gods sake set light bounces to more than one till you got your bearings and then only do so if you really think it will help. :)

[Codexus]

Thanks for the info about Brazil, it seems to be a very nice renderer. :)

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