More on MR Area Lights, DGS mat, FG, etc.

The #1 thing about area light shadows when using them in Mental ray is to only use the ray-trace shadows. You can get a soft shadow this way.

You see here an mr area SPOT light with the rectangle icon visible. We can only see the icon in spot lights.

Note – we do not even need FG or GI for the area lights to work. But, we do need mental ray for the area lights and for the DGS material we are using.

The material here for both teapot and plane is in a standard material with DGS MATERIAL [3ds max] mental ray connection:

Add a sky dome with glow applied ... exclude from the area lites ...

Next, turn on FG ... immediately we get a nice lighting ...

Dual skydome

Clone and reduce in size a second sky dome. Apply a sky image to it. Make this important properties setting to have it NOT influence the scene light color – visible to camera off ... remember to also exclude from the lites ... and turn up the self illumination

Let’s try the same lume glow an environment map, and hide the sky domes ... we can get about the same result but we have to crank up the brightness by over 200% ... the skydome seems to work nicer.

Now for our last version, lets turn off the background color and use a skylight ...

You could also make the environment a simple non-illuminated color ... but the influence on the teapot is minimal ...

combine it with the skylight ... you might need to dilute the color on it to avoid the color starting to look too densely painted ...

If we add a sky bitmap to the environment, we see the effects of the image on FG and the DGS material

Swapping out the DGS for Dielectric ...

Metal Lume