3ds Max Design and Sky Portals

Question

Interior Renders in Max looking nice but a little dim?  Interiors looking like a drinking venue in Staines (upon Thames) on a Sunday evening?Don’t want to adjust exposure in your scene as this will over brighten the exterior?

Answer

Then let there be light! Namely Sky Portals, (available for some time in 3dsMax Design) create a number of Daylight Portals over the relevant glazed curtain panels. Fiddle around with some settings, but not too much, limit changes to the multiplier to no more than 1.5 in my opinion or else the interior will look a little harsh. But the outside environment can make a big difference to the values you can set. As a comparison see the difference in the appearance of the second image, it is far less dingy than the former picture and there is no need to play around with the EV value too much (Found an EV value of ‘13’ and a haze amount of ‘6’ in the mr sky settings worked quite well with my example)

This will work just as well for internal renders, brightening up dark internals areas without leaching the appearance of ‘outside’ too much. Use the MR Photographic exposure to get the right ball park figure and then tweaked the EV value to suit.