Green Rascal Design

Here is a recap of Daylight in 3ds Max. Any project with exterior renderings has to have a daylight system. (unless only nighttime renderings are planned) And even if you don't plan to have any exterior renderings, if you have any windows in your building, you should have a daylight system. This is easy to create, and is often used for lighting studies at multiple times of day/year.

Logarithmic Exposure Control with the Exterior Daylight Flag is very important for making sure your renderings don't look over-expsed, or too bright. When this box pops up make sure to select yes.

Then I click and drag somewhere in the top view. That click becomes the center of my compass, and the drag makes the compass bigger or smaller. When I let go, the sun appears. The next click places the sun. It really doesn't matter how high you make the sun. If you make it low it won't cut off light from tall models.

Note that Daylight is different from Sunlight! You create Sunlight the same way, but it behaves differently. Daylight has time and place factors, plus the ambient sky light (that round part on top). You can tell it to be cloudy or sunny. Sunlight you just point in some direction, and it's kinda willy-nilly. Sunlight doesn't have an automatic sky. I only use Daylight. This is what they look like, for example.

My Daylight is an arrow right now, and in class you might remember it looked like a sea urchin. The difference is the type of Sunlight. I created a standard system, and now I will change it to an IES Sun and IES Sky. I prefer IES I think because of its scientific accuracy. And then I want to set its position. Typically I use the Date, Time and Location Setup.

Weather Data File is also useful for some applications. I would need to Load Weather Data here, but I do not have a weather data file. Those can be found online, but very rarely have I had to do it. This is just an FYI.

The only other thing I would do now is use the tiny grip on the right to scroll down to IES Sky Parameters and change Coverage to Partly Cloudy. If I was doing some real intense studies I'd leave it clear, but I like how Partly Cloudy looks. You can be the judge of course. Fancy things can be done with the Sky Color, and above in Sun Parameters with the Sun Intensity and Color, but that can generally wait until final renderings are coming out in need of something.

Here is a teapot and a plane. Always use a plane under your model if you have no other ground surface. The sunlight looks a lot more realistic with a plane because of the extra light bouncing up off the ground onto the model. Anyway, there is the teapot with a plane under Partly Cloudy conditions, and the teapot with a plane under Clear conditions so you can see the differences. And those are the basics of Daylight.