Hi, When i add a daylight system to my model, the lighting looks cool but the textures such as the asphalt and grass looks much lighter kind of an unrealistic colour (the road looks more like grey). Are there any settings i can change so i still get the daylight lighting system with the colours looking more like original?

Hi David,

Yes you need to adjust your Exposure Control settings. YOu can access these settings in one of two ways:

- In the Dynamite VSP Civil Explorer panel, expand the “Environment and Lighting” node and select “Exposure Control”. Ensure that the “MR Photographic Exposure Control” is selected in the Exposure Control Rollout.

- Alternatively, in the 3ds Max Rendering pulldown menu, select “Exposure Control”. In the resulting panel, ensure that “MR Photographic Exposure Control” is selected.

The parameter that you need to play with is the Exposure Value (EV) setting which is 15 by default.  Reduce this value to make the image brighter, and increase the value to make it darker.

My personal preference is to also adjust the mid-tones value down a little to 0.7 or 0.8.

Note that just like with a real world camera, the exposure settings will need to be adjusted if you change your daylight solution to a different time of day. The sun generates a much brighter level of light at midday than it does at 4pm for instance.

Finally, when you create a daylight system, the default time of day that 3ds Max uses is midday.  I would always change this to mid to late afternoon, or mid morning to give a more pleasing contrast of light across your model, and to create longer shadows. Your model will look MUCH better, and the only reason not to do this is if you have a specific need to simulate a particular time of day for some reason.

If you take all these simple points into account, I guarantee that your rendered images will look MUCH better. I hope this helps.

Cool, thanks for that Bruce think that’s just the info i needed, have a great day!

Hmm… I think I know where that job is

Don’t forget to check what your gamma is doing too.  That can have an impact if not set quite right.

David Lind - 13 October 2009 10:38 PM

Cool, thanks for that Bruce think that’s just the info i needed, have a great day!

David - any chance of seeing a before and after of that shot?  Might help other users to understand the difference that these steps will make.

Yeah ok i will do that
Was planning on saving adding daylight system til the model is basically done but i could prob save a test one. One thing i noticed when playing with these settings i wanted the road textures etc to be darker but then the sky goes too dark. I was thinking i must be able to play with the mr physical sky to alleviate that prob but havent tried it yet.
Cheers

Actually here are the images from when i was playing with the settings.
First is daylight with standard settings at 3pm EV=15
Next is daylight 3pm with EV=15.5, mid tones 0.8 (sky too dark)
Then is daylight 3pm with EV=16 and mid tones 0.8 (sky too dark)

Just a side question (because I don’t have Max in front of me), can the EV be animated?

no idea but i was thinking that because i like to animate the sun

Yes - EV van be animated. Pretty much anything can be animated in 3ds Max.

The MR Physical Sky has a Multiplier value which by default is derived from the sky element of the Daylight System. To lighten the Physical Sky you need to uncheck “Inherit from MR Sky”, then bump up the multiplier. I’d start with a value of 2 - that’ll probably be too much, but it’ll give you a good idea of the range between 1.0 and 2.0.