ABSTRACT
Lighting simply cannot be comprehensively covered within one book without spilling over into several related areas, notably materials, rendering and compositing. As one of the first third-party renderers to reach the market, debuting in late 2001, finalRender Stage-0 was certainly perceived as the most advanced Global Illumination renderer for 3ds Max. Perhaps it is the somewhat idiosyncratic versioning of the releases of finalRender that has led people to believe that its developers have been standing more still than they actually have been. In terms of version 1.7, Maxwell saw some pretty serious rewrites, as well as some key enhancements that include a physical sky model and Sub-Surface Scattering. Within the architectural market, it is fair to say that V-Ray has pretty much become established as the renderer of choice. There are many resources for 3D artists on the Internet, some more useful than others.
