N00b lighting question

[Servo]

I'm a total beginner at this so please forgive this most basic of questions...how do you guys create the lighting for the renderings you post of WIPs? A perfect example is Cobra6's Panther (which, BTW, is awesome). In the rendering, the model looks like, for lack of a better term, an unpainted plastic model, well lit with good ambient lighting and no harsh shadows. In the test renderings I've done of the Tiger I'm working on the lights & shadows are very harsh. Is there a lighting tutorial available or can someone recommend a good resource?
TIA for any help I can get!
And thanks to Ronnie (Skyraider3d) for recommending this site!

BTW the Tiger I'm doing is being created entirely in Autocad 2007 using solids and a mesh here and there, and will eventually be textured in 3DS Max9.

[krazycolin]

elight. (check out ronnies page for that...)

i use vray but thats not free...

[Lurtz]

I use spinning lights or GI, depending on the time for render i have.

[pete.cook]

Colin's right. The best freeware GI, fast and easy lighting solution I've come across has to be Ronnie's E-light.

You could use a Skylight and add a lightracer within Max's scanline renderer, which is easy to setup, but can take a long time to render with complex scenes or objects.

[cobra6]

For my panther I did the following:

-put in a skylight with a HDR map of a clear blue sky on 0.6 strength
-mental ray spot with a size(to get soft shadows) on 0.8 with raytrace shadows
-Put a slightly grey plane under the tank
-the tank itself was beige/creme coloured

Render with mental ray:
Global Illumination on and also final gathering

renders took about 45 minutes WITH the final gathering calculation in max 8
about 20 minutes in MAX 9 (because it calculates the final gathering WHILE rendering)

Thats about it.

Now I'm using an e-light and scanline because of memory issues.

Cobra 6

[scrimski]

You could use a Skylight and add a lightracer within Max's scanline renderer, which is easy to setup, but can take a long time to render with complex scenes or objects.

Don't do it. It may **** up your bump maps, there was a thread to avoid this, but usually it takes much longer to render than e-Light or an Ambient Occlusion(in mental ray)

[Skyraider3D]

It may **** up your bump mapsUse a Raytrace Material to prevent this from happening. With the Standard Material it looks terrible.



As for lighting setups, E-Light (http://e-light.skyraider3d.com) plus a single directional for the sun does the trick for me :)

[Servo]

Looks great Ronnie.....I'll give it a try this weekend.
Thanks to all who replied to the original post!

[Servo]

Thanks guys..I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I made a test rendering and it looks halfway decent.
Thanks again to all those who replied!

[kevjon]

Set up for e-light is in the obstacle course "3d aircraft tips"