Visualization in Max takes practice

There is no beginning to practice nor end to enlightenment;
There is no beginning to enlightenment nor end to practice.


Some things come easy. This is not the case when recreating reality within the computer.
I've been using 3D Studio Max for years. In order to create an image that is photo real one will have to work at it, practice, experiment, test, investigate options.
In my last Max class we came across what I thought was a bug.


Where is my sky?

How do we add a custom background to the “mr Physical Sky” environment? The mental ray sky is great but very generic. We should be able to use mental ray and get a custom background. It does not work as one would expect.

Here are the steps;

We start with a scene that has a daylight system, sun and sky.
When we add a daylight system to a new scene or a scene that had no daylight,
one receives messages suggesting the “mr photographic exposure” control or “mr physical sky”, choose YES.

We will now modify the environment to give us the ability to edit the sky and background map.



We do this by dragging the Map (mr Physical Sky) to the Material editor.

We will get a message stating copy or instance?
Choose instance, a clone of the same map in the environment.



We will edit the map in the material editor (mr Physical Sky Parameters) and all edits will affect the environment.

Most importantly “Use custom Background Map” choose the radio button and click none to browse the network for the appropriate background “bitmap”.

One would think this is all that’s necessary, but it still won't show up correctly.

In the Photographic Exposure Control dialog, we are modifying the Physical Scale, choose unitless and enter 100,000, without the “,”.


Almost there; now we need to adjust the image so it displays better in the rendering.




We will go back to the Material Editor and choose the bitmap we placed in the
Use Custom Background group;

Modify these settings to move the image into the right spot.
Or; edit the image and use cropping to alter what part of the image
You need to use as the background.



Opps
We can’t have the horizon line all fuzzy like the image below;


That’s a result of the Sky light. Edit the Daylight system and remove the check box
“Arial Perspective”

I know that was a lot of steps but, this is the Max way.
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?



After all of this the Brooklyn background looks terrible.
Time to pick another, If it has the same number of pixels as the resulting rendering it will look the best.