Hi, I’m new to 3ds max. I recently imported a revit project using the fbx method. Now I want to render this project in order to be photoshoped into a site photo taken at night. What I would like is for the lighting inside the building to wash outward to the exterior through a curtain wall. All of the lights have been imported from revit. They are all photometric and use IES profiles. I set up my render to use the mental ray photometric light preset and set my exposure control to the mrphotographic one. I also set my sunlight/daylight to 2 am. But, when I render the exterior of the building renders rather light and the interior lighting does not come through or even show up at all. Do i need to turn these lights on? Are there any basic settings that should be used for an exterior night scene?

Thanks

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Looks like it’s ignoring all of your lighting completely and rendering with the default 3ds lights. I don’t think the daylight system provides any lighting at all at night so the building exterior should be black.
I’d check whether the interior lights are turned on, as you suggest. Just select them and look in the modify panel - there’s a switch at the top marked “on”.

Daylight systems don’t work very well for night renderings.  Actually, that sounds kind of funny.  :) Turn off the Sun, reduce the multiplier on the sky, and try it again.  In fact, disable the sky first, set up Exposure and lighting until the inside looks good, then play with the Sky multiplier until it looks good.  You’ll want a little ambient light from outside.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Dave, I haven’t been using 2010 a whole lot just yet, but haven’t really noticed anything really slow about the viewports just yet.  Using the Direct3D video driver, viewcube and steering wheel off.  Nothing realy special just yet.  Driver version 6.14.11.6956 currently (updated last 5/28/2008, might be time to try an update?).

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Dave - has your model imported as hundreds or thousands of separate objects by any chance? I often find when importing files from other applications that performance is shockingly slow until I’ve combined the geometry into a sensible number of objects.

Under the Utilities tab is the Collapse command.  It can collapse several selected objects into a single mesh.  Be careful to only collapse objects with the same material, so you may need to make an MSO and assign material IDs before collapsing.  And many objects being collapsed can go slow, so maybe only do 20 or 30 at a time, not hundereds (like I tried once!).

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Also, check the options when importing your file. I haven’t used Revit but if it’s anything like AutoCAD there may well be an option to combine objects by layer.

I sometimes use the Attach List button from an Edit Mesh modifier to join objects together. This has the advantage of automatically assigning material IDs and MSO (multi/sub-object) materials but can put gigabytes of data into 3ds’s undo buffer. If you’re attaching lots of stuff it can be a good idea to temporarily set the “undo levels” in the 3ds preferences as low as possible.