Best Option for Studio Lighting

[dan_chomiak]

I need to do a ton of industrial animations (lots of screws, fasteners, sheets of metal and wood, that type of thing) and I'm wondering whether it would be best to set up a traditional studio lighting with 3 lights or you use the dome with a studio HDRI. Any type of feedback or solid tutorials would be a big help!!

Thanks a million!

[vladimir_krastev]

I would say both. Maybe start with the hdri and then add to it if you don't like it. Of course it depends greatly on the hdri map and specific setup. Switching between metal and wood for materials could be tricky. Might need to tweak the lighting for metal and for wood.

[^Lele^]

It also depends on the accuracy of the lighting you'd like/need.
A dome has its own issues, in that everything is at the same depth (be that "infininte" or "finite"), whereas real sources/reflection cards have their individual position in 3d space.
Consider that if you need to piece the many scenes together for rendering, you may find xRef scenes a big help (xref objects are more editable, but also more problematic, in my experience. i stand to be corrected.), so you won't need to deal with the lighting rig manually, rather you can add its scene via xRef to the master scene, parent it to a helper, and transform it wherever you need it (provided you won't need to edit it from inside the master scene.), which all in all is only slightly more work than texturing a domelight.
Repeat the process for the subject, and render.

[dan_chomiak]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!