Getting Started in 3D with 3ds Max

Effects, sometimes called special or digital effects, can be used to enhance your scenes to make them more convincing to the viewer. For example, in the outdoor windmill scene that you’ve been working on throughout this book, a few simple atmospheric effects may be used to change the mood of the scene from noon to early morning.

Atmospheric effects are applied to the scene and they can be based on the World coordinate system, as in ground fog, or placed inside containers called Atmospheric Helpers to simulate clouds.

When using the mental ray renderer, the Photometric lights in the scene have values determined by real world physics. Atmospheric ...