I've already turned in the assignment, however I'm curious why you set a really high strength (25) for the HDRI but then compensated with a negative exposure (-3)? I recall something similar being done in the lighting fundamentals course, but can't remember why -- also, I don't see the point? What does this approach allow you to do that normal/lower values can't?
PS. Thanks for the awesome course! I learned a lot, especially about building a better glass shader for Eevee.
Great, glad it helped!
While it's still personal preference, it allows me to use a closer to accurate value for the lamp. If the HDRI is the only thing lighting the scene then it doesn't matter, but when there are other light sources it can really help to have realistic ratios between them because our intuition about how "bright" something looks is usually off. This is the lesson from the lighting course that covers that: https://cgcookie.com/lesson/lighting-with-realistic-values-and-colors