This tutorial is designed to offer a suggested workflow for lighting design, as well as some technical information about lights and shadows.
Section One - Set up a Lighting Test Scene
If you are starting to light a scene that you've already built, it's a good idea to put your complex geometry on its own layers, then substitute simple objects as "standins" for your geometry. When you are creating a lighting design you'll be doing a lot of test renders; stand-in geometry helps you evaluate the lights and shadows without high render times.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we'll start with a simple arrangement of primitive objects on a plane. Every object has been assigned the same white lambert shader, so that we know that any color differences are due to changes in our lighting.
You may also wish to set your panels up so you can view your hypershade window, perspective window and render view at the same time. Select Panels -> Saved Layouts -> Hypershade/Render/Perspective
We're now ready to start putting lights in our scene. For a "still life" like this, I might put my first light above my camera and slightly to the right. This will be my "key" light, or primary light. To help me to place the spotlight, I'll use the transform manipulators to the left of the shelf. If you don't see them, click on Display -> UI Elements and make sure there's a checkmark next to Shelf.
These transform tools correspond to the q w e r t y hotkeys on your keyboard. The t key will display the manipulators of the spotlight.
A small button near the spotlight will cycle through the various manipulators of the light. The button is blue when the light is selected, but turns to yellow when it is selected itself. The first cycle, with the button pointing to 12 o'clock, is no manipulator. The second, at roughly 2 o'clock, selects the light by two transformable nodes - the "source" of the light and the "interest" of the light. Use this second cycle to move the light into place, using the orthographic windows.
Select your geometry and press the 3 key, the 5 key and the 7 key successively. This displays the geometry in high resolution fully shaded, showing the effect of the light as well.
