Another basic tutorial that talks about natural interior lighting and the “theory” behind it. A must, if you just can’t seem to get your interior scenes to look right. This 3DS Max tutorial will walk you through lighting a small room, using “natural” light casting through a single window.

This tutorial will help you create great-looking, volumetric lights in 3DS Max. In the real world, this effect is visible when there’s a lot of dust in an enclosed space. The tutorial also skims through basic interior lighting techniques, without going into too much detail. Enjoy.

This tutorial will help you master the art of caustics in just a couple of easy-to-follow steps. In essence a caustic network is the projection of reflected or refracted light rays passing through a transparent surface. In 3DS Max this is handled by the renderer, in this case Mental Ray. It calculates the angle at which light hits a surface and how it is affected by the surface’s properties.

Say you’ve taken a great shot of the sky on your holiday abroad. The cloud formation and lighting are perfect but somehow it lacks some dramatic accents and feels somewhat dull. In this tutorial you’ll learn to add those elusive atmospheric light rays. The tutorial covers the Motion blur effect, blending modes and some basic image retouching.

A quick 3DS Max / Mental Ray tutorial that will help you create a neon glow texture. You’ll learn to use the mental ray material and the Glow (Lume) map. The resulting textures will be procedurally generated and will only require 3DS Max and the included Mental Ray renderer. This really simple technique works best on smaller objects and not neon close-ups