In this tutorial we will learn how to use Final Render to render sunlighted room.

The scene is very simple: room with random scattered objects and pre-assigned materials. There is windows passing the sunlight.
Firstly, we will analyze the effect of sun light at the day times:
There is direct light cast by the sun directly through the window, this light will illuminate the area under the window and will cast dark and hard shadows on the ground.
There are also indirect lighting caused by the reflected rays from the ground and the walls. This type of lighting will illuminate the entire room with fading out at the far areas of room because the several bounces of light from the walls and other objects will weaken the light energy. The shadows from this indirect lighting will be very soft and faint.
Also the sky dome and clouds will cast rays. This is generally is the most important factor of lighting at the day time because not all area will receive direct sunlight but it will recieve some kind of the sky dome light. The sky is the biggest visible object in our world so it is the most important factor at day times. And will be effected by the weather if it is cloudy,windy or so on. The shadows cast by this type are soft and less dark
To simulate these 3 types of lights we will use 3ds MAX direct light to simulate the direct lights from the sun, for the indirect sunlight we will use final Render rectangle light and environment map (HDRI and so on) for the sky dome light.

Goto Final Render Satge1 Sunlight Tutorial

In this finalRender Stage-1 R2 training video,Edwin Braun goes over lighting an interior scene as well as techniques for developing good speed and quality workflow with AQMC.

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In this finalRender Stage-1 R2 training video,Edwin Braun goes over creating a forest with almost 7 billion polygons rendered with straight instances.

Introducing a compilation of finalRender Stage-1 full training videos for 3ds Max! A special thank you to the talented Loocas Duber for creating these great tutorials.

Loocas Duber is a 3ds Max instructor at Computer Graphics College and through his virtual workshop, Duber Studio, provides high-quality visual training for 3ds Max applications.

Each part of this 10 part series contains a full 30-40 MINUTES of training for finalRender Stage-1 for 3ds Max! These videos are FREE from cebas to our customers! Parts 8, 9, and 10 are topics for finalRender Stage-1 Release 2 for 3ds Max. 

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Although acceptable global illumination results may be obtained by using the environment color as your basis for lighting a scene, using a solid color, or even a gradient map will still produce only a uniform distribution of light.
The more I use HDRI the more I prefer it to other methods of GI. HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging. It uses 360 degree photos taken from a reflective sphere, a series of pictures with different exposure settings that capture the ratio between dark and bright regions as represented in the real world.
Mapped as a spherical environment, HDRI illuminates the scene with different levels and colors of light based on pixel information. The result is more realistic than other methods of generating global illumination, and the amount of light can be altered through the exposure settings.
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