Not every light-emitting object in your CG scene automatically calls for its own light in
3ds Max. Rendering tricks such as glow often are used to simulate the effect of an active
scene light. This way, you don??™t need to actually use a 3ds Max light. Of course, if you need
the practical light to illuminate something in the scene, you need to create a light for it.
3ds Max Lights
3ds Max has two types of light objects: photometric and standard. Photometric lights are
lights that possess very specific features to enable a more accurate definition of lighting, as
you would see in the real world. Photometric lights have physically based intensity values
that closely mimic the behavior of real light. They are rather advanced and will not be covered
in this book.
Standard lights are still extremely powerful and capable of realism, but they are more
straightforward to use than photometric lights and less taxing on the system at render time.
Default Light
What happens if you have no lights at all in your 3ds Max scene? In this case, the scene is
automatically lit by default lighting. When you add light objects, the default lighting is
replaced entirely by the new lights. There is very little you can do with the default lighting;
it is there for your convenience so you easily can view an object in Shaded mode and test
render without creating a light first.
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