It doesn’t matter if it is lighting in the real-world or digitally — Lighting is a craft. Understanding lighting basics is an essential skill to have. Also learning the classic styles and techniques goes a long way for digital lighting for animation and motion graphics. This is why I always highly recommend John Alton’s Painting With Light as a great reference for how things were done in the classic films of the 40’s and 50’s.
Still, lighting digitally means that you need to know your lighting tools. This means knowing some technical things about how lights work within the software.
If you are a beginner and would like to understand lighting basics, or just getting started with Solid Angle’s Arnold Renderer, you will want to have a look at Arvid Schneider’s new tutorial. Arvid has been posting tutorials that are meant to help new users get up to speed with Arnold in Autodesk Maya 2017. Arnold is the same regardless of the host application though, so if you are using Arnold on C4D or anywhere else, this is still a good watch!
Arvid covers most of the lights available in Arnold. This includes dome lights area lights, gobo filters, volume scattering, mesh lights, photometric lights and portal lights. The Arnold online documentation is a great resource for all things Arnold, including everything you wanted to know about Arnold Lighting Basics with plenty of examples.
