 In this video I will show how to use 2ds Max design for visualizing light levels inside your building or design project. So we will work with input parameters, how the tool is calculating, how we can use output and visualizations and which types of analysis can be helpful looking at the interior design conditions of our building. I have now opened 2ds Max design and this design tutorial I am going to show how we can use 2ds Max design for doing daylight visualizations, daylight simulations on a grid and how we can overlay data on a picture to see the amount of illuminance hitting the different surfaces in our model. The great thing about 3ds Max is that it really has a high degree of interoperability with other Autodesk products and because we need fast feedback on design when looking at daylight and other parameters that is really effective to use 3ds Max for doing daylight simulations. So what I did here is that I imported this model here from Revit and it is really simple to do this. Go here to the 2ds Max icon and just say import and then you can directly import a Revit file into 3ds Max and then combine it by using Revit materials and because these programs are using the same material library it is really you have already kind of set up the model when you have imported it. Just make sure that you are using mental ray materials and mental ray settings because this is the way that you can do physical accurate daylight simulations for the inside 3ds Max. So from Revit my daylight system was already imported and a camera view that I set up in the model because this is kind of the space I want to take a look at. You are also able to inside 3ds Max to look at artificial lighting with indoor spaces and on outdoor spaces. So let's mark out the solar system here and let's set it to Mr. Sky and Mr. Sun and then we can either import an EPW weather file or we can just specify the date and time and location here. So just going to set up and I am using the time I want to look at and I can actually interactively see this. Let's see this is the period I want to take a look at and I want to look at August because it is one of the extreme months for direct light and daylighting of course coming into the space here. So when that is set up I want to go to my rendering here and I want to go to environment and I want to set it up using Mr. Physical Sky and Mr. Photographic Exposure Control because it is using mental ray and I am just using here going to set this for physical based lightning indoor and see the impact here in the viewport. So the first thing I want to do is just to make a quick rendering or daylight simulation here or visualization and so I close this down and I just click here to do a rendering of this viewport. We can now save out this rendering for later analysis but the next thing we want to do is that we want to lay out a light meter or analysis grid that we can look at in combination with this picture to see the amount of illumination inside the work plane in the building. So let's save this out here as JPEG here. Let's close this down. The next thing we want to do is go to the lightning assistant here, go to the analysis output tab and go to grid light meter and just click in the right side and about that size. One bit annoying thing here is that we can't really out of fit this so we have to kind of fit it into the area where we want to put it about here. We look here, it looks kind of nice and we can of course if we select it we can go here to the modifier tab and we can work a bit more with the scale just here or work with the width and how many segments we want to have it split up in. We want to look at now is the total illumination and we can also look at the daylight factor and stuff like that and we can of course when we're done export the data to a CSV file where we can use it in Microsoft Excel to compare different kind of design alternatives. So just want to have a take a look at the height here, go to move and say mark out the grid here get it there and we say move and just press here 700 like that about the work plane height here and then we just go calculate all light meters now and we have now calculated the amount of daylight on our analysis grid and we can use a functionality here on the tools calling grab viewport and we can then create a still image daylight and we can then grab that and take it out to a picture then we can save later on. We are of course we are able to go in and work with the scale here to say okay in the same way that we can use the scale here as an identifier and you could check the other program we can do that here let's say we're between 0 to 5000 looks or maybe 2000 looks so in that way and identify we want to see where this over 2002 let's say 5000 looks because this will be some places here where we will have some possibility for glare and that way we can work with the scale and use the scale as an identifier. The next thing we'll do here is that we want to create an image overlay effect to visualize the illumination in combination with the nice daylight rendering we can make here and we do that by going to create image overlay and say edit and I already made one here so we can just activate that and now it's putting the data on top of this picture and now the overlay has done and we get really false color picture here it's not that useful but in here we are now able to use the scale again to see whether it's between 0 and 500 and update that and place our own metrics in here so this is really the workflow using 3ds max for daylight optimization