Ok, just gonna up and say it.

vrba79

Why does Iray lighting have to be so much more complicated than 3Delight's fire and forget approach?

Is there a tutorial for Iray lighting to the tune of "Iray lighting for stupid idiots?" 

Richard Haseltine

Try studying lighting for the physical world - Iray is seeking to emulate that.

FirstBastion

HDRI are already the simplest solution for lighting a character or an exterior scene.

For an interior scene,  place an emitter at every light source.  There are no shortcuts to proper lighting.

PerttiA

For interior scenes, you will do yourself a favor by setting "cm^2 Factor" to 10 in tone mapping, after doing that you can use real world lumen values with the lights and achieve results you would expect to see in real world with those lights.

The default settings for tone mapping are for exterior scenes with bright sunshine and they make interior scenes way too dark.

juvesatriani

Hi @vrba79 I feel your pain ! Just like everyone already mentioned , IRAY use or at least try to mimicking Real Physical Lighting + Camera setup . I`m not sure about how precise it calibrated .

But for Easy Way to altering the whole render is using Tone Mapper  especially the Exposure setting . Try play with it first to get how bright/Dark your scene will be . Decreasing EXP value makes your scene brighter .

Then also check in Environment Tab . It will control how Lighting behave . Dome and Scene basicly the same thing with option to render BG ( from HDRI ) or not . Its just like Uber environment in 3Delight . It grab the light information from HDRI images . I mostly used it as Ambient Lighting so I still need another standart lights ( Spot Light - Point light + mesh light ) to get  Overal Lighting Scene I wanted . Imagine you go to Photo Studio . And see there are plenty Light Rig to get images which if judged by final outcome it seem simple

Start with simple scene like Sphere and Plane . Experiment with all Environment and Tone Mapper first . You should get approx about overall tone you like . Then use standard lights to enhance or to make some objects/ body parts stand out than rest of element in your picture. After that final tune your surfaces .

ADDED :

People seem to dealt with surface first since most product already come with it . But for me getting lighting rig correct its first important step . Because thats how IRL photostudio or photoshot work , surface or material editing can come later if needed . With it you can know or judge which products having bad or good surface/material setup . And how you can improve it with dial right parameters