I published a collection of my light match .blend files, as was discussed during the class. You're welcome to reference those if you'd like. Also here's links to the reels 
shiennar put together:
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #4 (Oct 31, 2018): Class is officially over! Please check the closing post and don't forget to fill out the questionnaire 🙇🏻♂️
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #3 (Oct 9, 2018): Grades for week 1 homework are recorded. Feel free to keep an eye on this spreadsheet (BC4-1810 tab at the bottom) throughout the month. Please let me know if I miss anything!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #2 (Oct 3, 2018): 4 mighty Citizens have heeded the call to become Volunteer Assistants (VA's). They are: 
silentheart00, 
thecabbagedetective, 
csehz, and 
galledark. This means that between the 5 of us, there should always be a helpful presence both in this homepage thread and your individual homework threads throughout the month. Thank you VA's!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #1 (Oct 1, 2018): Class is officially in session! Check the syllabus below for Week 1's focus and assignments. Begin watching the pre-recorded courses if you haven't already and I'll see you tomorrow at the first Live Event! 💡
Welcome to the CGCookie Class: Shading & Lighting with Blender! The art of shading and lighting your Blender scenes and models can make or break your renders. It's a very important - even enlightening - skill to develop as a 3D artist.
This "Class" format invites all Citizen members to focus together on a particular topic/skill for a month. Participation looks like this:
WHEN? The class will take place from October 1st - Oct 30th.
Abstract: There are some core concepts to lighting and shading (S&L) that need to be understood first. Things like global illumination, render engines, shaders, materials, and node networks some of the things we will be over-viewing this first week. I
Goal of the Week: Familiarize (or re-familiarize) ourselves with core S&L concepts.
Pre-recorded course to watch:
Week 1 Live Event (Remember to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: The Eevee render engine is the latest and greatest rendering tech in Blender and we're going to stretch its legs for week 2. The subject is going to be a sports car, but any vehicle will do. After all many of us spent this past June modeling vehicles and we're eager to get them lit and pretty!
Some topics we'll cover along the way include materials like car paint, rubber, metal, and leather along with HDRI environment lighting.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 2 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: Character lighting is a very intentional art and how to do it well is often a mystery. This week we'll look at how to develop striking character renders, build simple materials that accentuate your model, and even the concept "painting" you character with light for surreal effects.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 3 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: Arch viz rendering is often a coveted skillset among lighten enthusiasts. This week we're looking at lighting interior architecture for realism, featuring natural outdoor light from windows and artificial light from light fixtures. We'll also explore creating the necessary materials for our interior.
Pre-recorded course to watch:
Week 4 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
This thread is reserved for CG Cookie Citizens that are participating in the "Shading & Lighting with Blender" class. Its purpose is to serve as central communication for all participating Citizens (excluding Hobby plan Citizens) to ask Kent and fellow participants questions and to post homework. As the instructor of the class, Kent will be monitoring this thread on a daily basis (especially Mon-Thurs) throughout the month of October to review homework and answer questions.
Free members are welcome to observe the thread but please respect that communication and participation is reserved for Citizens.
4 mighty Citizens have heeded the call to become Volunteer Assistants (VA's). They are: silentheart00, thecabbagedetective, csehz, and galledark. This means that between the 5 of us, there should always be a helpful presence both in this homepage thread and everyone's individual homework threads throughout the month. Thank you VA's!
ppbriggs The video is still encoding but it'll be available to watch very soon.
Quick tip for people who are doing the bedroom exercise in 2.8 Eevee. When rendering the scene, I noticed that the render was much brighter than the viewport. After some searching I found the culprit - the "Portal" lamp. It was used in Cycles to guide light into the room, but in Eevee it doesn't seem to be supported (at least I didn't find the option). Since the portal now acts as a normal lamp, you will need to disable it for rendering as well.
shiennar Brilliant tip indeed - thanks Kate! I'm quite intrigued to see how Eevee handles that exercise.
Since this is a current Mac problem that I had asked Kent about, he asked me to post this to the Class Homepage:
I am using an iMac and almost always use Environment Lighting with HDRI images for the background lighting - these are always mapped using a Texture Coordinate node and a Mapping node so that I can rotate the environment to change the lighting/mood of the final rendered image.
I have found that in trying to use Eevee I can no longer use Environment Lighting with HDRI images with the mapping feature. When the environment image is used "as-is" (without a mapping node) then it works fine, but once the Texture Coordinates node and Mapping Node are used the whole scene goes pink.
If there are any Mac users who have experienced this or know a workaround that you could post, that would be great - thank you :)
Hey guys, I'm super excited to start this class, but I couldn't attend the complete live class so I tried accessing the recording.
But something super weird is happening, the video keeps shrinking and shrinking on the page, I imagine it's a CSS or HTML problem, I can't even click it fast enough to expand it.
I attached a screenshot to tell you what I mean.
Ps: I'm using a MacbookPro 2104 + Chrome browser
mmatthew1917 I can confirm that I also have that issue on my mac with the latest version of Blender 2.8 alpha 2. Bummer. I've experienced this in earlier builds as well. The way I've adjusted for it is by rotating all objects in my scene (including the camera). Essentially the inverse of rotating the environment texture. It's definitely not an ideal solution but it works in a pinch..
If any other Mac users have discovered a fix or workaround, please let us know!
vverygrinderchuck Yikes, that's a problem. I just reported it to our website bug squasher and it's in the queue for fixing.
In the meantime perhaps trying another browser like Firefox if the problem persists.
@theluthier certainly draws your attention and makes you look at the picture longer, pretty cool 😎
@theluthier I think you can never have enough inspiration, so in the spirit of this class I also wanted to share some lighting pics that I came across when searching for pics for the light match exercises, it's this art station page of John Kearny , I really like the contrasting colors of light he uses, also like the mood of his pictures has a sci-fi feeling to it.
Would love to see what inspires you guys!
ssmurfmier1985 Yes yessss, I totally affirm this artist's lighting quality. I've seen some of these pop up on my twitter feed recently. Thanks for sharing.
And certainly everyone is welcome to share examples / artists that inspire your lighting goals!
@theluthier Just got that ad, spoopy. I swear if I get anymore "Subway footlong for £5," ads though I'ma flip. Maybe I'll give this a go at imitation... 🤔
Unfortunately I couldn't get myself to wake up at 3:30am yesterday so I missed the first class. Will definitely watch the replay but I'm not sure if I will be taking part in any homework this month because I'm at the pointy end of completing and releasing a Unity Editor Extension. It's really exciting and all but I really want to be spending more time in Blender!
cptken Whew 3:30am..who picked that live stream time anyway....... 😑
Sorry about that, Ken. I remember you from the last class and would enjoy you participating this month as well! I understand timing and busy-ness not working out though. I will re-run this class in the future, so you know, in case you can't make it.
Someone was asking about Mix Node. I actually didn't know much about it myself. So found something that helped me a lot to understand what differents are between mix modes. Hope that will help.
Kent @theluthier thanks for making available the recorded version of the live stream in 24 hours, that always help a lot in the time management of the weekly class exercises for those, who typically can not participate in live like me. I have just managed to watch it already today so on Thursday and have more time jumping into the homework exercises :-)
Also there were some interesting short polls again initiated by Kent in the stream, let me love the statistics as usual and take the occassion to summarize some numbers from our consolidated report card.
Basically what do you think, how many students participated in CG Cookie Classes in 2018? Well, the so far number is 133! That sounds quite a lot.
Then who got the most XPs in 2018 by submitting homeworks in CG Cookie Classes? The top 3 actually is 1.Matthew 
ullreym , 2.Katerina shiennar , 3.Jere 
swikni, congratulations and hopefully you will be able to manage your fifth consecutive class :-)
In the stream the first poll was about that how many new participants join in the BC4 - 1810 October class, let's see the result on a chart:
Anyway it also gave the idea that historically this could be interesting to see also for the before classes, on the first one everybody was new of course (orange dotted line), but also in the next ones always quite a lot new members joined:
While in the meantime the ratio of those who participated in multiple classes is relatively smaller (eventually there can be also some scenarios when someone once joined by username and once by real name, will try to double-check that), but based on the experience this "core team" is so strong that your class experience is guaranteed :D
Finally, here comes a chart about the experience level in BC4 - 1810 October class which was the second question by Kent, good to see again that healthy mix:
It is the last sentence but before of anything, welcoming all of the new members joining this month to the CG Cookie class, keep up the good work and feel free to ask and let's meet in the fifth live stream at the end of the month. Wishing that because it means you managed to participate till the last weeks with the huge benefit of feeling - I have done it with learning a lot and at the end got the well deserved XPs too :D
csehz Thanks again for the statistics! It's really neat to see the distribution of new and old people in the classes.
csehz those are some good lucking numbers Zsolt, thanks for doing the math once again! 😄
Looks pretty good imo. This is the kinda light setup I'll file away in my head and [hopefully] summon it later.