Best way to light world?

[Veleno]

Hi arshbot, the short version is either to use baked lighting for all the statically lit objects in the scene, or bake just indirect light (sometimes just ambient occlusion) and use realtime lights for the direct light.

The first works pretty okay, but loses lighting detail from any bump maps because the lightmaps don't include directional information.

The second works best for medium-sized outdoor scenes that can use a shadow casting directional light. These can be created in Inspector.

If you're doing a flashlight scenario, fully baking lighting is probably going to be the best option. Until you have it baked, you can also set a scene's ambient light level to something like (.3,.3,.35) - fairly dark with a slight blue tint. This can be set in inspector at the top node level if you check the "save settings" box.

If you aren't already, you can also automatically generate a skydome by placing a sky map with a spherical projection in Max into the environment map slot of Environment and Effects and checking the "Background Map" option in the exporter.