General Lighting

Here we can find tips on Getting Started and FAQs for Lighting.

Getting Started
You're given a scene! Ask: With this information, you are ready to start lighting! Ask: IMPORTANT NOTE: Don't move on from this step until you are comfortable with your three light setup. Adding more lights won't fix issues you have with your existing ones, and in most cases, will only make it harder to fix problems later on.
 * 1) What is my reference?  What type of mood am I trying to convey? What time of day is it?  What time of year?
 * 2) What and where is your light source?  Is this an interior or exterior?  Is it an interrogation room or a shopping mall?  Are the streetlights on because it's night, or are they off because it's the day?
 * 3) What is the relationship (both value and color) between the highlights and the shadows?  What color are your shadows?  What level of saturation are we going for?
 * 1) What is my fill light?  This light will give you the color of your shadows.  What is the overall color of the scene?
 * 2) What is my key light?  This is the main light source of the scene.  It is important to think of how soft the shadows are.  Think about this in relation to the real-world light source.   Is it a ceiling fan?  A flashlight?  The sun?
 * 3) What is my bounce light?  This is the light that reflects back up from the floor.  What material is the floor?  How reflective is it?  What color is it?

FAQs
Q. I am unable to link my light to an object in Maya. Why is that?

A. Maya will not allow you to link lights whose shape node name is different from the transform node. To troubleshoot this: Q. What are fireflies and how do I fix them? A. Fireflies are noisy artifacts that are caused by bright lights. When the white value of a pixel exceeds 1 (it's maximum), the render engine does not know how to calculate it, and it becomes a firefly.
 * 1) Select your light
 * 2) Navigate to the Attribute Editor (Ctrl+A)
 * 3) Compare the transform node name to the shape node.
 * 4) Rename your shape node to be the same as your transform node, but with "_Shape" appended to the end. (For example, if your transform node is called "lampFill", name your shape "lampFill_Shape".

There is not a 100% fix for fireflies. One thing that you have to understand is that there are cause by lights that are extremely bright, so one easy fix is to dim the light that is causing them. Increasing the roughness or reducing the bumb depth value of the object material could also work (it reduces fireflies as it is effectively creating a larger, softer specular highlight). You could also clamp the max value of the final image (Therefore making the render to ignore any value over 1) but this would remove any dynamic range from the render images (like .EXR files types)