From the course: 3ds Max 2026 Essential Training

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Using the Light Explorer

Using the Light Explorer

- [Instructor] Once you have a few lights in your scene, you can speed up your workflow using a window called the Light Explorer. This is a version of the Scene Explorer with particular settings to display only lights and their most important parameters. To approximate the final rendering, I've created of viewport user preset called Standard all lights, and that's the mode that my perspective view is in. For better fidelity, I can set the camera view to ActiveShade using the Arnold GPU renderer. If you have any issues with that, then just switch back to the Nitrous display mode with Standard all lights. Let's open up the Light Explorer. It's found in the Tools menu under All Global Explorers, Light Explorer. And let's resize this window. We have a bunch of columns here. Not all of these are necessarily relevant. A bunch of these are kind of legacy and don't apply to a current physically-based workflow. We've got things in here such as Shadow Sample Range or Light Map Bias. Well, these…

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