How to Use IES Lights in 3DMax

Hello VRay users, Alex here your VRayGuide. And today’s hot topic is going to be about IES lights in VRay of course with the help of 3D Max. As you all know IES lights is those really cool lights with cool shapes and they can bring a huge impact into your scene illumination. So let me show you some cool links where to get them, how to view them and of course how to use them in 3D Max.

So this link I can show you called Lithonia it’s even better ECCO the website that I showed you last time. If you go into Lithonia.com you can find here a link that says Photometrics and if you go here you got a huge library of free Photometrics lights for download. So if you just press this All Photometrics Data Files you can download the whole folder in one piece. So after we got those lights we need to view them. And in order to view them correctly we need to download and install Photometric Viewer. So if you just go to PhotometricViewer.com you're going to reach this nice website and as we see here already in the preview we can view those lights. So click download and go to the download page, click download button and save this file to your computer, install it and you’ll have this cool program for viewing those lights.

So I'm here in the LL Library, we’ve download it a few seconds ago. And if I just go here into emergency lights for example, I can see the numeric exposures of those lights and if I click the render button I get the preview of this particular light. In this view as you see I can play with the brightness and this basically the intensity that we’ve got in 3D Max, the distance, how far it is from the wall for example. And the zoom is basically if you scale your light, this is basically what you're going to get. Okay, so we’ve got our lights we’ve got our viewer. Let’s go check it out how to apply this into 3D Max.

The first thing that you want to do is you want to create a light. I'm using a free light, you can also use a target light, it just will be much easier to point the direction of this light and with the point light you just basically got this target and you can direct the light in the – in some direction and to be much easier to control it. So I’ve created this light and make sure it’s in the middle and it’s comes from your spot or other element just make sure it’s near to your light source to your object that produce light. And after we create it, we just go into those formats as you see here there's a bunch of options, we can choose, intensity and we can choose which type of shadows, we’re going to use of course purely shadows and this in light distribution we need to select Photometric Web.

Photometric Web allows us – brings us this nice panel, distribution photometric web. If you click here to choose the light, where you got this, you got it here. You can select the light and it will be automatically applied to your photometric light. So basically here you can rotate it. Here you got whole different types of light distribution. You can increase the illumination with the percentage. You’re just going to leave it as a default or a test to you. And of course you can add some cool color in order to make it a bit interesting for our 3D rendering. So this is basically it.

This is how you add, how you find it, you view your photometric for your IES lights in 3D Max and you render in with the help of viewer of course.

If you didn’t succeed in it and or if you want to have this thing, you are all welcome to subscribe and download it for free of course from my blog. And if you got any questions you are always welcome to ask me anything you like or just post the comment on my blog or just stop to say “Hi”. This was basically it, this was Alex your VRayGuide subscribe to my blog, check out my free videos and there and only remember if you want to do it right, do it like a pro. See you next time, bye.