Part 7 – Viewport Lighting

Viewport Lighting

You can preview your light setup right in the viewport without having to render. This is OK for individual scenes, however as your scene increases in face or “poly” count, you will find the “fancy stuff” will increasingly weigh down your viewport performance and you may want to turn it off. For our small scene though, it will work great!

Make sure your viewport is in Smooth and Highlights mode
Right click on Smooth and Highlights > Lighting and Shadows and check or uncheck until your viewport settings match mine below. If those options are not available, you will still be able to follow along. Rather than seeing the updated settings in real time, you will have to press the render button to see your changes.
Your viewport should look like the below image.

Now, when you adjust your lights position the model’s shadow will adjust with it in real time.

Test your environment setup

Simultaneously holding down the ALT + middle mouse button is the quick way to orbit., so do it…do it now.
Find a good angle to create the test render. I usually go for a low angle as it adds a certain level of “cool” to your shot.
Press F10 to bring up the render dialog box
Find the Output section and change the Output size to HDTV (bottom of list)
Press the 480×270 button
Render a couple shots at a couple different angles to get a more comprehensive idea of your lighting solution.

Once you like what you see, remove the XREF and save the file as “Environment”

Putting it together

Now that we have materials on all of our models, it’s time to xref everything in to our environment scene.

XREF the piping, structural, and building models into the Environment.max scene. Save this file as <PROJECT FOLDER>maxS01S01_Flythrough.max It should now look something like this: (I added a grass texture to my ground plane) Do NOT merge the xrefs yet!

Orbit around your scene and take some test renders as you go. Look for objects missing materials and fix the object in its corresponding scene.
Change your viewport to the Top view by pressing “T” and then “Z” for zoom extents.