Use Viewport Lighting In Render

[Anonymous]

Hi, recently I've been messing with lighting in 3DS Max so that my renders do not look completely dark. For most situations, I prefer more ambient lighting rather than anything too complex; To that end, I've experimented with a few Arnold lights here and there, but many of them are rather bright, and don't correctly render the PBR materials that most of my models use.

That brings me to ask: Is there a way to make a render just use the default lighting used by the viewport? Because in the viewport, those materials look just fine, especially if I set the ambient lighting to a brighter color. (In older versions, changing the ambient light would also affect the actual render, but this setting appears to be deprecated in 3DS Max 2021...)

Is anyone willing to help? I can provide images if needed!

[Anonymous]

Bump!

[CAMedeck]

I don't believe it is possible to use the viewport lighting.  If you add in lights and they're too bright, it is likely that you need to enable Exposure Control to adjust the overall brightness of your renderings.  Use the hotkey '8' to bring up the dialog to enable and adjust it to suit.

[Anonymous]

Okay...I managed to adjust the exposure value to something I liked, but there's still one problem: The glossiness that appears on PBR materials in the viewport is a lot less pronounced in the render. Why is this? That glossiness is crucial for making my models look right.

Comparison:

ViewportRender

[CAMedeck · Accepted solution]

Did you add in lights, and are they being used to light your viewport?  What you see in Perspective is a specular highlight, and is an approximation of what it would be when rendered.  And if you are using Default Lighting, those light sources don't exist during rendering and will not create a highlight.

You could try using a bounce card or something to get a highlight like that.  But it is not likely to show in the viewport and render exactly the same.

[Anonymous]

The bounce card seems to be working well enough. Thanks! I'll make another post if I have further issues.