Advanced Tech: Lighting & Texturing

For my 3rd part of Advanced Tech I had to light a room using standard and photometric lights on 3Ds Max. If i said it was easy I'd definitely be lying!!! For me, this project was definitely the hardest and most irritating one so far! At the beginning, I just didn't get it at all! But luckily I managed to slowly and painfully get something to work! And by "painfully" I mean ... clicking some buttons, hitting Render, then waiting 5 minutes or MORE to see if it looks good was PAINFUL! especially when it DIDN'T look good!

I didn't realise how hard lighting was until this project! Now I have a LOT of respect for the lighting artists who work on films and other stuff!

After doing this project I'm thinking that Lighting is not for me ... but then again, this was my first time ever using lights properly on 3Ds Max, so I would love to learn more about lighting to be able to do it properly next time, and obviously update my lighting skills ... but next time I do it, hopefully there will be less stress! :)

*p.s. all the caps and exclamation marks were needed! :)

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Here's a lighting exercise we did in class ... we needed to show off the lights with 3 spheres which were Refractive, Reflective and Self Illuminous ... I'm happy with this little exercise:


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Then came the hard part! Lighting a room!
I didn't exactly build the room from scratch ... I basically decided what kind of room I wanted, then designed it around pre-built objects I downloaded from the internet.
I textured all the objects myself, and had to show off the lights in the room again by including a refractive, reflective and self illuminous material like I did in the class exercise.
I decided to make a kids room because then I was able to have a lot of colour in my room, which for me, is a lot more interesting than a plain room with all the same colours.

Here are my final renders of my room!
There are 2 for each time of the day ... Dawn, Day, Dusk & Night!
I'm happier with some more than others but as a final thought, this project has been a huge learning curve and I'm interested in learning more!
(quickest render took about 3 hours ... longest render took about 24 hours!!!)


Dawn:



Day:



Dusk:



Night: