Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Continue from the previous section or load the file “Office Suite Render_05.max”. In this section, we’re going to adjust the settings for our light meter
helper and we’re going to capture the viewport to show the light meter help values that reflect our daylight factor. So, select the “light meter helper”
object, switch over to the “modify” tab and in the display parameters roll-out, and click on “daylight factor”. Now, we want to adjust the value of our
color; right now you see that everything is blue and our value goes to a maximum of, looks like 11.6% of daylight. In order to change that, we’ll click on the
“pseudo color edit” option; that opens the lighting analysis assistant and in the analysis value color coding roll-out, we’re going to set the minimum
value to 0 and the maximum value, since our maximum percent is 11.6, we can set the maximum value to .12, which would be 12%. Since we’re not
dealing with Lux here, we’re actually dealing with percent, 0 to 1 in Mental Ray is the equivalent to 0 to 100%. So, .12 becomes 12%. You’ll notice in
viewport now, we have a nice gradation of color from red all the way to blue. Now, let’s capture this viewport using the tool under the tools menu called
“grab viewport”, so click on “grab viewport”. We can name this viewport if we want. Name it “daylight factor” and click “grab” and it puts a little
box down here that says “daylight factor”. We can save this image and call it “daylight factor viewport.png” and since I already have one, it’s
going to ask me if I want to overwrite it and I’m going to say “yes”. It will bring up the PNG configuration options, we’ll save it to an RGB 24
bit, click “ok”. We’ve saved that file down to our hard drive for later use, whether we’re going to use it in a power point presentation or we’re going to
just sit down and review it with some other engineers or architects. So, once we’re finished with this, we can close our dialogues and we’re
ready to go.