
Now you have essentially established a lighting setup that uses real-world values, and you can adjust the Physical Camera’s settings to control the lighting as you would do to take the real photograph. Apply these values to the Physical Camera inside 3ds Max and tweak your light-source (for example, your HDRI or Sun) intensity until the resultant render’s lighting levels resemble those in the real photograph. Take a photograph in an environment similar to that which you are rendering in automatic mode and note the shutter speed, aperture and ISO speed that the camera uses. Use Realistic Lightingīase your lighting setup on real-world environments and your material texture and color will appear far more convincing. If you adopt the philosophy of attempting to replicate real photography, your images will begin to take on a photographic quality. Rendering software allows endless tweaking of camera and environment settings to bypass real-world photographic constraints in order to curate a very specific image, but doing this will invariably result in a distinctly CGI look. Instead, try using narrower-angle lenses, and if you do need to include more of the scene, pull the camera back and use the clipping plane to clip foreground elements from view. This will also help to avoid the temptation of wanting to show off all of your painstaking modeling in one unrealistically wide-angled image that attempts to capture the entire scene. This way, you will only need to model what the camera can see and will save enormous amounts of time.

Move your camera around inside 3ds Max to select desirable points of view and frame shots prior to going into detailed modeling.
