Visualization in the Raytracer Renderer (ART)

GEORGE MAESTRI: Good morning. One more day at US. Is this too loud? Am I feeding back? OK. Keep talking, he's telling me. OK. Is that about right? OK.

Good morning. My name is George Maestri, and my day job is a staff author at LinkedIn Learning and also Lynda.com. So you can see my courses in both places.

So today we're going to talk about the Autodesk Raytracer Renderer. Now, I was at a rendering for 3DS Max talk yesterday, and they said right now art is only 2% of the people who actually render in 3DS Max. But I think this will grow.

It's actually a very good renderer. It's brand new with 2017, so it's still got some adoption issues. But this renderer also works for Revit, Inventor-- I don't know the entire list, but it populates through the Autodesk suite, so you will see this renderer in a bunch of places. We're going to focus on it specifically in a 3DS Max content.

So the Autodesk Raytracer is a fast, physically based renderer is available for a number of Autodesk applications, and we're going to show you the art renderer. So we're going to start off with setting up the renderer. Renderer setup.

Then we're going to go into materials, specifically the physical material, which is kind of the new material that you need to be using. And then we're going to look at lights. And then we're going to take a look at the scene converter, which is also new in 3ds Max 2017.

So key learning objectives. Hopefully, by the end of this class you'll be familiar enough with the renderer to be able to use it in your projects. And it is a very easy to use renderer.

So what is ART? ART is a raytracer renderer and it is termed an unbiased renderer. Does everybody know what that means?

Well, it means that it's physically accurate, and it works really great out of the box. So it simulates reality. Now, biased renderers, such as Mental Ray, have a lot more buttons and controls.

And those can be good or they can be bad. But the reason they have those controls is so that you can dial it towards or away from reality. ART doesn't have a lot of controls because it's really just designed to simulate a camera in a real world environment. And that gives you some advantages and some disadvantages.

If you're looking to do artistic tune renderings, or stuff that's kind of pushing the renderer to something a little bit more stylized, ART may not be the one. But if you're looking for something that's physically accurate that kind of looks like reality and that's easy to use, ART is a great renderer. So ART is pretty darn good at reality.

So we're going to start off with render setup, and that's really where we set up any render. So we have a couple of render settings here. The three main ones are quality, fidelity, and filtering.

So I'm going to hop out of this and let's take a look at 3ds Max here. So I have a basic scene here. And let's take a look at render setup.

So the ART renderer is also a progressive renderer, which means that it fills in the details kind of a dot at a time. So you can kind of start to get the results pretty quickly. In fact, if I do a quick render I think this will render here.

So what it does is it will kind of-- oops, let's select the proper viewport there. So as you can see, it's just starting to fill in the details. And so the longer you let it run, the more details it will fill in.

So we have a couple of main controls here. The number one control here is this render quality. And so basically, the further to the right you go, the more renders and the more quality you have. OK?

Now, we have the target quality is actually listed here as a db level, which is a noise level. And so if I wanted to, I could turn this up to a higher number, and notice how this db level goes down.

And so now with it at high, it will take longer to render. But you'll still see kind of the really noisy version right up front.

So this is actually a really great way to work. I love working in Active Shade with this because I could, for example, select one of the lights here. Let's say I take this light, and I could start playing with intensity.

So if I wanted to, I could dial down the intensity, and it's going to go ahead and reflect in the render. So you can interactively work with it. It's really nice.

Now, one thing I didn't mention up front and I do need to mention now is that ART is not a GPU-based renderer. It's a CPU-based renderer. Let's get that clear.

So do you understand the difference between CPU and GPU renderers? A CPU renderer renders on your core I7-- your Pentium-- your Intel processor in your computer. A GPU renderer renders on your graphics card. So if you have a Quadro graphics card, it's going to be rendering there.

Now, there are benefits for both. With a GPU renderer, you can actually add graphics cards and get additional render speed. With a CPU-based renderer, you kind of have to upgrade your motherboard. But I'm currently just rendering on this little laptop. It's only a dual-core laptop, and as you can see I'm getting results.

So if you had an eight-core system or something more than that, you'll get some pretty nice results. Anyways, so render quality. Now, if you want you can also stop rendering after a certain time.

So if you only have five minutes, give it five minutes and it'll get the most quality it can get in that five minutes. Now, that quality will vary depending upon the computer you send it at. So if you have a render farm, and three of the computers are slower than the others, they will be giving you lower quality images.

So you have to be very careful with this if you're doing animation. If you're doing animation, you want to make sure that you have a specific quality and not just do it via time or iterations. OK? Cause that'll give you varying levels of noise and will make your animation look kind of-- won't make it look that great.

So the next one here is lighting and material fidelity. Almost always you're going to leave this on fast path tracing, and that's the faster way to do it. It's great for probably 90% of the situations. You're not going to need more than that.

And what's really nice about this render setup window is it actually gives you hints right here. So this tells you it's high fidelity, optimized for indirect illumination, and recommended for production rendering.

The next one is called Advanced Path Tracing, and that's better for things that really require sophisticated raytracing. So if you understand what raytracing is, the sophisticated raytracing are things with lots of glass reflections, things that are really bending light through the scene. It's very high fidelity, renders very complex light interactions, but at the expense of long render time.

So if you want to do an overnight render, give it a try. It doesn't even need to be overnight. It will take longer, but it's not like it's going to take days or anything.

And with all of these, one of the things you should do is just experiment, do some tests, see what works for your scenes and what doesn't. If you start using a new renderer, what I like to do is I like to just give it a bunch of different things and see what works, see what doesn't, and just kind of go from there.

Now, the next one is really important. This is called Noise Filtering. Now, what Noise Filtering does is it filters out this noise.

So if I were to do a render here, you'll see we get this initial graininess. And the longer we render, the more that graininess goes away.

But it takes longer and longer and longer for each pass of graininess to go away because what it does is it takes the whole picture, and then it chops it into four, chops it into eight, 16, 64-- basically, it's kind of just going lower and lower and lower. And every time it goes lower, it takes a geometrically longer time to go through it for one level of noise reduction.

I'm going to get to that in just a little bit. We're going to talk about how to actually balance noise filtering versus quality. OK? And then we've got a couple of other things here. We've got the filter diameter, which is how much does this filter work?

Now, the filtering is basically a blurring algorithm, in case you're not familiar with that. It basically is just blurring the little details, or the little noise speckles, to get something that looks good.

And then finally, under Advanced, we have a basic default point light diameter. So if you put a point light in the scene, how big is it going to be?

Now, ART is a physically based renderer, so it treats everything as physical. All the lights, everything-- it tries to model it from a physical standpoint.

And then also we have this thing called Animate Noise Pattern. And what that does is, if you are doing animation, the noise pattern will vary.

And so if you do have a little bit of noise in your scene, it'll just kind of look a little bit like film grain. That may not be a bad thing. It just depends on what your aesthetics are.

I'm going to show you some slides here. So let's go back to quality. This is your main control for the renderer. So more time is better quality.

But how much time? How much time do you have? I remember working in a studio once, and one of the IT guys wasn't much of a rendering guy or anything. And he just ran the computer and he goes, you know, every frame takes five minutes. He goes, 10 years ago, five minutes. Now it's five minutes.

And you know, you can fit a lot more into the frame for that five minutes, but you still have deadlines. You've still got to get stuff out the door, so you've got to put a limit on how much time you spend on the frame.

So with that in mind, I did some tests. We took that watch, ran it through my home computer-- it's about a three-year-old computer. It's a six-core I7-- I think 32 gigs of RAM. So nothing special.

So these numbers-- you may get faster numbers, but at least we have some benchmarks here. So I hope you can see this. A lot of times rendering courses and projectors don't go well. So I hope you can see the noise in this. I think you can.

So at draft quality, this amount of noise took 25 seconds. Medium quality. A little bit of noise. I don't know if you can see it, but it's still a little grainy. 141 seconds. So it's almost five to six times as much time just to go from draft to medium. OK?

So you are seeing a steep increase in render times. High. To me, to my eye, this looks actually really, really good. There's very little grain here. 490 seconds.

Now, these weren't big images. I think these were 640 by 640. Something like that. And then extra high, 1,268.

So if you're just using the renderer, somewhere between medium and high is usually a good place to start. You can always start with draft to make sure that you get things in place, but then when you start to go to final rendering, I would probably go into that area.

I don't see much of a need for extra high quality. If you have the render farm for the night, go for it. But if not, I don't think it's needed. But again, it's there.

So each level of quality is three to six times slower. So we're getting a geometric increase in render times. OK? And that's the problem with all rendering is the better it gets, the slower you have.

So let's talk a little bit about lighting maternal fidelity. I talked about it when I went through there, so this is kind of just a repeat here. Again, fastpath tracing is faster. Advanced past tracing is slower.

Now let's get to noise filtering. Again, it reduces rendering noise from lower quality renderers. So if you have a lower quality renderer, you might be able to filter that up to something acceptable. OK?

So if we go to a medium quality renderer that's only 140 seconds, you might be able to get a quality that's somewhere between medium and high and that's enough to get the job done.

Now, the noise filtering does add blurriness. So if your scene has a lot of fine details, you need to make sure that you pay attention to those details so that you're not blurring them into obscurity. So with the right scenes, it can be much faster.

So here are some tests I ran with noise filtering. Now, let's go back to-- just for a second here. I just want to show you the noise filter. Let's go into render settings here.

Noise filtering goes from 0 up to 100. OK? So 0, 25, 75, up to fully filtered. So I was running these mostly in increments of 25% at a time.

So at 0, you can see it has a lot of noise. I hope you can see this on the screen here. But at 0, it has a lot of noise. 25, you still see some noise. 50, it's starting to go away. 100, the noise is gone, but so are the fine details.

Look at the top of this watch. Look at that little 12 o'clock tick there. You can see it here, here, here, but by here you can see how it's kind of just blurred and gone away. So that's what noise filtering does. Noise filtering is also detail filtering. So you've got to be careful with it.

But here's the trick is that the higher the quality, the finer the details and the finer the filtering. So right now, I'm filtering at the level of this noise, which is maybe at a pixel or two.

If we go higher, then it goes down by a factor of four, and it goes down by a factor of four again. So you're filtering at a finer level in addition to rendering at a finer level.

So if we go to medium, you can see at 0-- I don't know if you can see this on the screen. But if you look at my screen here, you would see a reasonable amount of noise still in this gray background. This is where you usually see that sort of noise.

Usually you see it in the sky. You see it in big, solid colors. At 25, that's starting to go away. At 50, I personally think it's acceptable. And then at 100, again, it's very, very smooth.

And notice how we have a less detail lost. So if you go between this and draft, notice how this here is completely gone, but if we go to a medium you can see it. So medium quality is giving you a finer detail of render and a finer detail filtering. So again, you're kind of finding that balance.

And then I went and just did this on the high quality ones, and quite honestly I'm not noticing much of a difference. So your eye may tell you differently, but generally, at high quality and above, you probably don't need filtering.

And that's just my experience. Again, the manuals for this aren't really all that robust at this point, so a lot of this was me just experimenting with it and reporting back to you. So if anybody knows different, please let me know.

So the other thing is filtering times. How much more time does it take to filter than to render? And here's the good news. It doesn't take that much time to filter.

So at draft quality, it added one second. It's funny-- these numbers aren't really linear, but medium quality it added 13 seconds. Eight seconds for high. 14 seconds-- so it's going to add a few seconds to your render. Maybe 5% at the most, but you get a lot better quality of a render.

So I think the takeaway from this is that you are going to want to-- if you want to get renders out the door fast, probably something in the range of medium quality with some filtering is a really good way to go. So my results for noise filtering-- it can create acceptable renders much faster.

Usually it only takes a few extra seconds. And for me, the good starting point-- what I found was kind of the happy medium-- was a medium quality with a 50% filter. Start there. If it doesn't work, dial down the filter. Dial up the quality. You'll find the happy spot for your particular scene.

Does anybody else want to take a picture of that? Go ahead while I caffeine up here. It's still early.

So now let's get down actually using the thing. So let's work with materials here. 3ds Mas is standard material. Anybody know how long that has been around? 1996. Remember it. 20 years it's been around.

Actually, probably earlier if you count 3D Studio, which was the original derivation of that. So it's been around. Slowly it's being replaced by the physical material. And the thing about the physical material is it's much more compatible with all renderers.

So you're going to find it's much better with Mental Ray, V-Ray, and ART. So it's meant as an all-purpose material. It's got a lot of buttons and controls, so you can do a lot of different things with it.

Like I said, it can be used with multiple renderers. If you're really into the Arch+Vis materials, those will still work with ART. The standard materials will still work with ART, but my suggestion is that you start moving towards the physical material because that's really going to be increasingly the new standard material to use.

And you're going to get a lot more out of the materials anyways. So I would strongly suggest that you start working with the physical material.

So let's take a look at the physical material. We're going to start with presets, and then we're going to go through base color/reflections, transparency, and a bunch of other stuff. And I forgot to bring my handwritten notes, so I'm doing this from memory.

So let's go with this. So let's start off with just some scenes here. We're going to start with this one here.

So I've got this beautiful modern sculpture. Let me show you a little bit what this scene looks like. I'm going to show you in perspective view. Let's go ahead and use default shading here. So what I've got is I've got this kind of curvy object inside something that represents a conell-- is it conell box or Cornell box?

Anyways, it's a box with colored slides so that it will reflect those colors when you go into it. So let's go into rendering here. I'm going to go into Active Shade and make sure everything is set.

I'm going to go ahead and just put this up a little bit so we can see it. So it's going to progressively render as I blather on and talk. So let's go ahead and do a quick render of what we have. And I'm going to open up the small material editor.

And the reason I'm doing that is just so I can fit everything on the screen. If I were to open the other material editor, it takes up the whole screen and I can't really show you everything.

So I'm going to go into the material for this. There we go. OK. So this material here on this, I made it a multi-subobject material. But this material here-- the white-- is what we're going to be working with.

So let's start going through the physical material, and I'll give you a little bit of an introduction to it. How many people have actually worked with this material? Three people. OK. Good. You're going to learn something.

So as you know, we've got all sorts of different great materials here in the Material Map Browser. Physical materials here under General. We also have the standard, which is mostly for scanline, though it does work with ART.

And then we also have all the standard Autodesk materials, and the Arch+Design ones as well. Now, physical material. We do have a lot of different presets. So when you bring the physical material into an object, this is a great place to start.

Now, I don't know if you can read this from where you're at, but we have glossy paint, satin paint, matte, varnished, and so on. And we've got all sorts of woods, concrete, metal, aluminum, and so on.

So we do have a lot of good places to start. We have sports car paint. We have candle wax, which is a subsurface scattering type of material.

So we've got a lot of different materials. So if you want, you can start with one of those presets. And that's always a good place to start if you don't know exactly where to go. Start with the presets and you'll get 80% of the way there.

Bring in your own bitmaps, materials, adjust your reflectivity, and you're there. OK? But I'm going to go ahead and start from scratch.

Now, this has the basic physical material on it. Now, this is around this white area. So that's the base physical material with no changes.

So the first thing we want to do is just look at the parameters here. So the top parameter here is a coating parameter. So has anybody ever used the car paint shader in Mental Ray?

What that is is that gives you a multi-layer effect. So when you do a really good car paint, what you have is you have a base coat, which might be red, and then you do a tinted clear coat over it, which might be a bluish or purplish.

So that way, when you look at the car this way, it's kind of purple and then it's red. It gives you some really nice light effects.

So here we have that effect, and that's called a clear coat effect. So what it does is it puts a thin layer over the top of your material, and you can add a second color coating to it. OK?

So just think about it as a car paint kind of material. But the most important one here is base color. So in this main section here, we have four different types of controls. We have the base color, transparency, subsurface scattering, and emission.

So base color is the color of the objects. So if I change that to purple, it re-renders as kind of a purple color. Or we can change it back.

We have a bunch of different controls here. I'm going to go ahead and make that slightly less white so you can start to see the highlights a little bit.

So we've got four controls here, one of which probably shouldn't be here, and that's Index of Refraction. Index of Refraction is basically a transparency effect. It's how it refracts light, and we'll get to that when we get to transparency. But for some reason they put it in base color, probably because they didn't have enough room.

But we've got three controls here. The actual color itself-- so what you can do is you can actually dial in how much this color affects the total output.

So if I were to actually bring this to 0, it actually takes that component of the render out. So I don't really have a base color. All that I'm seeing here is the glossiness and the reflectivity. I'm not seeing the base color.

So you can use that. It can be fun. Let's go ahead and bring it back to 1. And I'm really impressed that this is all rendering on a two-core processor. I just want to say that.

So we have two here, roughness and metalness. Now, roughness-- typically, when you're in a renderer, you will see the glossiness control. So when you do a blend shader in Mental Ray, you see kind of a glossy or a specular highlight control. This is the opposite of that.

So 0 is glossy. 1 is matte, or Lambert. Everybody here familiar with what a Lambert shader is? If you go to 1 on this, this becomes kind of a Lambert.

So notice these highlights here. Let's go ahead and bring that up to 1 and let's see what happens. So the roughness of the surface diminishes specularity and glossiness. So now this is not very glossy.

So I'm going to bring that down to 0, and let's take a look at this other one. The metalness of the surface is basically your reflectivity control. I don't know why they call that metalness-- I guess it does make it look a little bit more like metal.

But if I were to keep the roughness at 0, so it's very glossy, and bring the metalness up to 1, hopefully we'll get an effect. Let's see. There.

Now we have a mirror. So as you can see, this is reflecting everything around it. So this is your reflectivity control. So we can dial this in as to what metalness we want versus-- let's go ahead do one more thing and then we hit escape.

So if we keep the metalness at 1 and roughness at 0, we get a mirror. If we bring this up to 1, we get kind of a brushed metal effect.

So it's reflecting the light and gives you a different effect. So these two controls in combination can give you a lot of really cool effects.

So I'm going to stop there. Actually, I'm not. I'm going to do one more. I'm going to do everything at 0.5 so you can kind of see what the balance of it is here, because we need to get going here.

So that is base color and reflection. So let's go ahead into another scene here. And let's take a look at transparency.

I always find that getting a good glass is the test of a renderer. How easy is it? So let's take a look at this.

So I've got this bowl on a table here. And again, let's do a quick active shade. So this bowl, right now, again, just has the default material on it.

So if we take transparency, we can dial it up and we will almost immediately get a glass effect. So transparency is basically designed as the object is solid glass.

So if you were to look at this, say, in wireframe here, you'll see that basically it has an outside and an inside surface here. So what it does is it assumes that the space between the surfaces is solid glass. So when I turn on transparency-- let's go ahead and turn it up to, say, something like 0.9, we'll start to get an effect. Hopefully. There we go.

I believe that's it. Let's make sure this is applied to that object there. OK. There we go. OK. It wasn't applied.

So now, once I have that effect, you can see I'm starting to get a glassy effect. But one of the things is that I do have some issues with Index of Refraction. So your index of refraction here is going to determine how much light is bent.

Now, you can index this to the exact IOR of the material that you use, or you can just type in numbers. I'm finding for this scene a lower number slightly above 1 seems to be something that looks pretty good for this particular scene.

And again, now I'm starting to get an effect that looks somewhat like glass. So it's actually a very easy thing to do. Now, in addition to this, we can color the transparency.

So if I were to, say, select a color here, I could make this maybe a blue glass. Something like that. You can see how, again, the transparency is becoming very blue.

If I were to go way up here, you would get more of a bluish kind of glass. But as you can see, that transparency-- the color here is actually determining the transparency. So darker colors are going to make the object less transparent.

If you really wanted this to be a blue glass, it would be easier to actually change this color here. So as you can see now, the base color is really where you want to change the color of the glass because this color is just the color of the transparency. A little bit different.

So we've got a couple other controls here. One is thin walled, and what that does is that takes away the calculation that this is a solid piece of glass. It turns it into two thin, transparent walls like a soap bubble or something like that.

So when I turn that on, it kind of gives you that transparency that you get normally from old school renderers, where you kind of have to fake the transparency. And then we also have depth.

Now, what depth does is it controls the depth of the transparency. This will only be transparent until this point. So as you look into the ocean, it gets less and less transparent. Or a cup of coffee.

So this is good for things such as fluids or volumetric type effects. So that's it for transparency. Let's go ahead and go into emission.

So emission allows an object to be a light. So if you want a light in the scene, you need to use emission.

So in this case, let's go ahead-- actually, I think I have a layer here. Hang on. Yes, I do.

So I've created a simple object. This is just a torus. And if we were to render this, you would see a torus in the scene.

But if I take the physical material of that torus and I crank up emission-- now, emission emits light from that object. And we have two controls here. Actually, three controls.

One is the amount of emission in the shader. So this is your percentage of emission in the shader, so if I bring it up to 1, it will 100% emit. And watch what happens in the render here. Boom. This is a nice light source.

And then we can also control the luminance and the temperature of that light. So if I were to, say, bring this down a little bit, it would illuminate less.

And then finally, we have things such as-- I'm starting to run out of time here. We also have things such as bump map and displacement map. Is everybody familiar with bump mapping? I'm going to go ahead and skip over that.

One of the things, also, with displacement mapping, it will work in ART. You just need to make sure you have the geometry to support it.

So if you put displacement mapping on something and nothing is displacing, add in something like a turbo-- in fact, let me go ahead and show you how that works here. So I've got this scene here.

So let's say I wanted to put some rocks here on the bottom. So let's go ahead and just create a material. There we go.

I'm going to go ahead and apply that material. And let's say I wanted to do some displacement mapping for that. Well, I can certainly add in a bitmap.

And I have two objects out here. I have gravel and a bumpy gravel, which is kind of just like a noisy texture here.

Now, if I were to render this, you would see that there's really nothing going on. And that's because this geometry is just a single plane. There's nothing in the middle there to actually displace.

So what we have to do in order to get displacement mapping to work is to smooth it. So if I throw on a turbosmooth, notice how that immediately displaces. So I can turn down my displacement here. Let's say, make it say 0.2 or something like that. A little bit less.

And then as I turn up my smoothing, notice how that starts to smooth out the displacement map. And that's because this object here-- let's see if I can turn on wireframe. So as I turn up the iterations of turbosmooth, it's giving more geometry for it to displace.

So when you work with displacement maps, you need to make sure you give it geometry to displace. That's all.

So let's hop out of materials. Go onto lights. Slideshow.

Lights in ART. You need to use photometric lights, and why is that? Because standard lights don't have real world parameters. Again, remember, ART is a real world unbiased renderer.

If you throw a standard light-- five minutes? Oh, gosh. OK. Let's keep going. If you throw a standard light into it, it's not going to work. So let me just show you a few tricks here.

Oh my gosh. Running out of time. OK.

So I'm going to show you a couple of tricks here. Hopefully you can expand on this. So lighting.

We have to use photometric lights. If we use standard lights, we're not going to get an effect. So here I have a scene with some lights. Basically, two photometric lights here. I have a spot light and kind of a point light.

So let's go ahead and render this. Now, one of the things we want to be able to control is the softness or diffuseness of the shadows in a scene.

So here I have a simple scene with these two lights. Let's go ahead and just turn off this point light here. I'm going to go ahead and select it here.

Come on. Not perfectly fast here. Actually, I'm going to leave this on. So notice the shadow here. There's a very, very sharp shadow.

And that's because when you first create a spotlight, it comes in as a point light. But we can change that.

So if we go down to Shape Area Shadows, we can actually turn this light into all sorts of different shapes. So if we want to, we can turn it into a line, which would simulate a tube light, rectangle, soft box, disk, sphere, or cylinder.

So I'm going to go ahead and turn this on as a rectangle. And notice how I get this big rectangle here above the light. And that's determined by these spinners here.

So this will determine how big this rectangle is and how big that light sources is. Now, notice also how this light has suddenly become a lot more diffuse. And also, the shadow is more diffuse.

So if you want diffuse shadows, then go ahead and add in Shape Area Shadows into your light. Now, because we're using photometric light, a lot of this stuff won't work.

We can't use shadow maps. You can't do all those little tricks you used to use. But you can use this trick here.

So we can do the same for this light here. If I wanted to, I could turn this on. Maybe instead of make it a rectangle, make it a sphere because it's a point light. So now you've got this big globe on the other side and that's going to create soft lights.

Now, another way to create lights is to use emission. Now, I showed you how to put the torus in the scene, and how that created kind of like a light effect. You can also use image-based lighting for that.

So in this scene, I believe I miraculously have a cylinder here. And let me go ahead and unhide that. OK.

So if I go into my material editor here, I already have this kind of done. So what I've done is I've created a cylinder here. And on this, I have mapped an image of a lighting studio.

So does everybody understand what HDR images are? An HDR image is a high depth map image. And you can usually find them on the internet. If you search for HDR background, or HDR lighting, usually you'll find a library of images here.

And if I take a look at this-- I wonder if we can take a look-- so if we took a look at this image, it's basically an image of a photo studio. But what this is is it's not just an 8-bit JPEG. It's actually, I believe, a 32 or 48-bit depth image, which means it has a much, much higher range between shadow and light. And these make for great lights.

So if I were to take this light here, turn it off, take this light here, turn it off-- so both of these lights are off, and I have this in this scene, and I turn up my emission, all I'm going to get is the light from that image.

And if we render this, you'll see that I'm getting kind of a really nice glossy kind of light. So what we've got here is we've got this image-- the only light in the scene is from that image.

So it's kind of like I'm faking a photo studio just by a picture. Now, this doesn't have to be a photo studio. I can certainly bring in another image here.

I've got a picture of a beach here. Let's see. So I've got this image here. And as you can see, it's starting to-- let me make sure I've got that in there.

So what I'm going to do is go ahead and just click and drag this on to there. Hopefully. OK. Let me redo this. Images. The pressure is on. OK.

So now I've got this beach image as the light. So now I'm getting a very bluish cast. OK? So if you are doing an outdoor scene and you want a sky illumination, take a panorama, map it to a cylinder or sphere, and use that as kind of your dome light.

Now, one of the things that I've noticed is that if you're using sun and sky, sun and sky and domes aren't really all that compatible because the sun and sky comes from an infinite range. And if you have a dome over your scene, it actually blocks the light. So you've got to be careful with that.

So now I've got this in this beach scene lighting. And if I wanted to, I could turn on my other lights and now I'm going to get the effect of my spotlight here. Hopefully. There we go.

So now I've got image-based beach lighting and the spotlight, and you can see that I'm getting a really cool effect. So I think I'm getting called into-- we're going to have to stop. I'm not going to be able to get into the scene converter, but let me just quickly show you where it is.

I'm sorry? We have time? OK. Cool. Let's do this. OK. So is everybody cool with lighting? Any questions or anything? OK.

So let's go into a scene. That guy was kind of peeking in and he was going, five, five, five. I'm like, OK. OK. OK. Let's do this.

So I've got a scene, and this is a good, old-fashioned, boring 3ds Max scene. I've got the scanline renderer on. And these lights are standard lights. OK? So these are basic target spots, and we can add in depth map shadows and all that fun stuff that we used to do but we don't have to do any more.

But let's go ahead and do a render. And so that's what this looks like. So really simple scene. The lighting is not great. I just kind of want to show you how this works.

So one of the first things I want to show you is that, in a scene that is lit with standard lights, if we render using the ART renderer, we are going to get something that looks like this. We're going to get an error message, and we're going to get a lot of black.

So again, photometric lights with ART renderer because it is a photo-real renderer, so it needs real world information. But we can change this using the scene converter, which is brand new.

So we find it under Rendering, Scene Converter. It's really simple. The way I use it is I open it up and I hit Convert Scene. That's all you have to do, but let's go through some of the stuff.

So we have options. Do we want to back up our scene? We can also do batch conversions. So if you have a lot of stuff that you need to convert, there you go.

You can also convert things such as material libraries. Now, we also have this tab here called the editor. And what this does is it allows you to select what your target renderer is. So it's going to convert the scene to work best in the ART renderer, or IRAY, or Mental Ray.

Or we can use a renderer preset, and then we have all these presets. So I'm going to leave it at the default of ART renderer.

And then over here, we have a list of what it's actually going to do. So under Materials, it says it's going to convert Mental Ray and ART design to physical material. Autodesk material and physical material. Standard material and physical material. Lights.

And it's going to convert these lights to these lights. Blah, blah, blah. Now, you can only convert the selected objects, apply only to the selected-- so if all I wanted to do was materials, I could select materials and apply only selected, or lights, or whatever.

But I'm going to convert the entire scene, and this is going to take a really long time. About-- well, this is a very simple scene, so it's done.

So now remember in your mind's eye what that scene used to look like. Let's go into rendering again. Active Shade. ART renderer. Let's do a quick render.

So it converted that scene. Now, one of the things we're seeing here is that the lighting isn't the same. And the main reason for that is because we came from standard lighting. We had no physical parameters on those lights, so the converter just kind of had to guess.

So if you're converting from standard lighting, you are going to have to do kind of a pass over it to figure out what the lighting is supposed to be. So if I were to bring this up to, say, 4,000 instead of 1,500, you can see I'm starting to get more light in the scene.

But also, notice how this is a lot more realistic looking than the old scene. And this also converted my materials on my objects, which were all standard materials. We converted them to physical materials.