Kent, I'm learning a lot from your 3D videos, but these 3-point lighting ones need some work for the 2.8 series.
To be honest, the rim light example here looks terrible. It's overexposed, and should not go fully around the subject!
"A rim light looks best when we are not confined to this kind of studio setup."
Lol, what? Every video/photographer in the world uses 3 point lighting in studio setups including rim lights in far more constrained places than a virtual world. I've set them up in tiny offices.
You would have gotten a better result had you put the rim light opposite the key light (anywhere from say 180 degrees off the key light to around 90 degrees off the camera). Then kept the strength low. Say 1000W for the key, 300W for the fill, and anywhere from 90-300W for the rim. That would have given you a very nice rim or kicker light on the dark side of the object.
The first light was a back or hair light. It might be better to draw a greater distinction in usage from the back/hairlight and the rim light. The latter serves a specific purpose of separating the dark side of the subject from the background.
On the previous video, where you landed on a 1:3 ratio key to fill is common and good. You generally want the fill light to be unnoticeable. Thus you should start your recommendation there, and you don't want it to be a different color than the key! That just looks like bad photography.
Also, it's a bad idea to teach coloring your key light as a general rule. Again that just looks like bad photography as if you didn't properly white balance your camera.
It's a far better recommendation to have the key and fill be a neutral white light (camera is properly white balanced). The rim light can optionally be a slight blue to increase the separation effect. Then as a separate post production step, the whole image or video can be colored if desired. But coloring the key and fill lights is a bad way to teach, IMO having run a video production company.
I wouldn't do it any differently in an animation studio. Imagine having spent a month rendering out 130,000 frames with colored key lights, then turning over the footage to a colorist or a post-production studio and have it be rejected by QC because there's so much color baked into the lights that they can't achieve the proper lighting look we want. OMG.
I hope you consider these points for the 2.8 version. Thanks for the videos and instruction though.
