Hey all: 

This is going to be kind of long as I’ve been doing Max for a little over a year now and I’m still struggling with some lighting concepts in my scenes.

Some background:
I work for a structural engineering firm that uses revit for all of our jobs.  My company often has me do buildup sequences in 3ds Max Design to produce animations to show our clients.  These scenes almost always involve large models of buildings building themselves up or something similar.  The way I learned how to start doing this was using the mental ray sky.  I typically leave it at the default settings and orient it to best illuminate the scene.  The only changes I make is changing the exposure value from 15 to 14.5.

Problem 1:
This problem comes from when I make an animation that circles around the building.  Naturally, since the light is coming from a single direction the opposite side of the building is darker due to the shadows.  I figure the easiest solution is putting the mental ray sun on the same path as the camera, but I don’t know how to do that.  So I’m looking for either how to do that or a better way of doing it.

Problem 2: 
This comes from zooming in on section of a building where the interior is meant to be shown OR trying to do a walkthrough.  The mental ray sky system seems to be terrible for this.  If I try zooming in, everything on the interior is very dark and shadowy. How can I illuminate this better?  I’ve tried all kinds of light sources and everything I have done seems to look terrible.

Problem 3:
How can I lower the horizon line? The grayish background tends to wash out a lot of the concrete colors. 

I am attaching a youtube video of one of my later animations. The first 10 seconds or so appears to be buggy but the video illustrates each of the issues I have listed. I would appreciate any commentary with regard to my lighting problems or any feedback in general.  This was done in 3ds Max Design 2011

Thank you

	Video

to get rid off the dark shadow areas you could lower the sun multiplier and increase the sky,
you can also ad some haze,
uncheck inherit from sky and play with the values
also change the non-physical tuning values
the horizon hight you also change in the sky parameters
in the exposure control lower shadows to 0

you can start with these values and go from there

daylight parameters
sun parameters 2.0
shadows softness 5.0
softness samples 24

nonphysical tuning
red/blue tint 0.3
saturation 0.5

sky parameters
multiplier 4.0
haze 1.0
non-physical tuning
red/blue tint -0.25
saturation 0.2

exposure control
highlight 0.2
midtones 0.9
shadows 0.0
color saturation 0.8
whitepoint 5600

and if you don’t want to deal with that you can increase the final gather bounces and/or ad sky portals. or you can ad global illumination and dial down the decay to say 1.8

you may also want to take a look at this
some interesting ways off reveling objects for your animations
http://area.autodesk.com/blo...k_university_in_las_vegas

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