For the video render of my asset I set up three-point lighting within maya. This is the standard form of professional lighting in the video production and still photography industries and it consists of a ‘key light’ at a 45 degree angle to the subject to act as the main and primary source of light, a secondary ‘fill light’ at -45 degrees to the subject and at around 50% intensity of the fill light, used to illuminate that which the key light cant reach, and finally the ‘rim light’ at 20% intensity placed behind the subject used to illuminate and define it’s silhouette.
I used area lights to make up the three point lighting and set each of them at their appropriate intensity relative to light at the bottom right of the screen capture. For the beauty shots I experimented with multiple different light arrangements and intensities, and it was at this point I decided I wanted to model the pedestal as well, which ended up looking like so:
