Day light in 3ds max

I am about to write a small tutorial explaining how to use

realistic lighting in 3ds max using mental ray,

lets assume that we already have the scene all it needs is lighting.

 

First to use mental ray we have to change the render engine of 3ds max from the default scanline renderer  to the mental ray renderer,if you know how to do that jump to the next step, go to render setup then to common tab and then press the button next to the default scanline renderer label in the assign renderer relout, a dialog will appear select mental ray renderer.






As we have mental ray renderer enabled we can go to the next step, create a daylight from create tab press system group then click on daylight and drag and drop to the scene, a dialog may show up asking you to if want to use mr photometric exposure  control just press yes and later we will talk about it.
Now lets adjust the day light, select the day light (dont select the compas, select the spot light icon) and then go to day light parameters rollout in the modify tab; make sure both sunlight skylight check boxes are active if they are not enable them,

now set the sunlight to mr Sun and the skylight to mr Sky;
adialog may show up asking you if want to add
'mr Physical Sky' envirement map press yes.







 
We can even setup the light direction, time, date, north directionand and  the inclination angle of the light by pressing setup button.
I will change those values in order to make the sun rays comes throw the door, you can setup the light according to your needs.
 




   In my case I've left the everything by default i have only changed the timing to have a good lighting throw the door; now if hit render you will see something like the following picture :

Using reactor in 3ds max

   In this tutorial we will show how to use reactor in 3ds max, we are not going so far in every detail because our goal is to give you simple idea how it works, so we will start by creating a simple scene with few objects in it and give eatch object a mass and a simulation geometry...etc
 
   First lets show reactor tool box if its not already shown, right click on the main toolbar and then from this menu click on reactor you will see the reactor tool box like its shown in the following picture:

  Now we need to create our objects to do that go to create tab and click on geometry and create a plane, then I recommand to set both height and width to 100 (you can put any value you want), and move this plane to the origin point. Ok now we have the plane in place it will play the role of the ground. Create box and set width, lenght and height to 30, and move the box to the following position (0,0,50).
  In this exemple I have created a box, but you can create any object you and as much as you want.
Ok, now the fun starts we will assign some physic values to objects. Select the plane and then go to the reactor toolbar and Open property editor  leave the physical properties to the default value and go to simulation geometry relout and select concave mesh.

 

Now select the box and set the mass value to 50 and in the simulation geometry relout select bounding box.

 After that we need to add this objects to a rigid body collection so go to reactor tool box and create RB collection to do that click on this icon:

ok now in the modify tab of the RB collection in the properties relout click add and select both plane and box then press ok

We're done to see the smulation go to reactor tool box and press preview animation button.

press the P key to see the animation, in case you want create animation you can just press create animation button on the reactor tool box