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Standard studio lighting setup
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Before you start

This tutorial assumes you already completed the previous ones in the tutorial list.

It will provide a general workflow for a standard studio lighting setup: create the environment, place lights, adjust render settings.

The Vray version I used for this tutorial is 1.47.03. 		 
1. Build a testscene

Start up max and set Vray as the renderer.

Go to 'customize - units setup' and set both the display unit scale and system unit scale to metric: millimeters.

Create 3 geospheres with radius 35mm and position them like I did. 		Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
2. The groundplane

We will try to build an infinite background in a simple way. Usually photographers use a big white or black cloth behind their scene, curved at the bottom, so that you will not see a sharp edge between back wall and floor.

There are of course lots of ways to do this. I will start from a cylinder, bend it locally and round it off with a meshsmooth modifier. This way, your groundplane is very smooth and round in all directions, making sure you will not have disturbing reflections from it (like you would when using a box for example as groundplane).

Click the image on the right to see all settings of the cylinder, bend and meshsmooth modifier.		 Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup

Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
3. Create a camera

Now create a camera and position it like in the image on the right. Give it a 50mm lens. Set the perspective viewport to use this camera, enable 'show safe frame' so you can clearly see what part of the scene will be rendered.		 Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
4. Create materials

We need three materials: 1 almost white, 1 chrome and 1 red reflective.

Click on the image to see what settings I used for the chrome and red material. (this should look familiar if you completed the Vray basic materials tutorial)

Assign the materials to the spheres. The groundplane also uses the almost white material.		 Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
5. Test render settings

Open the render settings dialog and do the following:
- set Vray as the renderer if you haven't done so
- output size to 480*360px
- global switches: turn off default lights
- image sampler to adaptive QMC
- antialising filter "mitchell-netravali"
- indirect illumination ON
- Secondary bounces multiplier to 0.8
- Irradiance map settings:
     - "low" preset
     - hsph subdivs = 20
- environment:
     - skylight pure white color, 1.0 multiplier
     - reflection/refraction pure black, 1.0 multiplier
- system:
     - render region division 50*50 px
     - frame stamp: delete all except rendertime part.

Render the scene, it should look similar to my image.		 Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
6. Reflection planes / lights

Instead of the skylight, we will use big rectangular Vraylights to light the scene. They will also be usefull for creating nice reflections. (like we did in page 2 of the material settings tutorial)

Create two Vraylights and position them more or less like I did.

The left light is 400*350 mm with a 3.5 multiplier and the one on the right 360*500mm with 5.5 multiplier.

Then go to the Vray environment rollout and change the skylight multiplier to 0.1.		 Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
7. Render what we have for now

If you set all lights and sky multipliers like I did, lighting should be more or less correct. I made the right light brighter on purpose, that way you create shadows falling in one direction. If you would set them at equal strengths, the image will be uninteresting as lighting will be a bit flat, coming in eqaul strength from all directions. The bigger the difference between the two lights, the more dramatic lighting will be.

The first pic shows left=3.5 and right=5.5

The second one has left=2 and right=7

We will continue with the 2/7 settings.		 Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup

Vray tutorial - Standard studio lighting setup
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