Minor Project: Lighting 2 - Rendering with Arnold

After some experimentation in Arnold yesterday, I felt it would be good for me to go back over the Lighting & Rendering tutorials as they have been updated for the Arnold renderer. I'm more accustomed to Mental Ray at the minute versus Arnold so I hoped focusing in on those tutorials will help me become more familiar with how the render settings and lights have changed so I can better understand what I'm doing.

 I have not looked at the stylized tutorials too much since in my projection I'm looking more at realism but I may at least watch them just in case there are any other useful tips in them. I still want to go over the HDR Dome, Sky Dome, Standard Surface, and Geometry Override Sets tutorials as well as any other relevant tutorials that pop up over the next few weeks.

I do feel I now have a better understanding of how the lights work in Arnold which is good since yesterday I felt pretty clumsy with them and it took longer for me to get close to what I wanted to achieve due to my unfamiliarity with this version of Maya. I do wonder, however, if yesterday my light was bugged as I set the penumbra angle and drop off correctly (and was visible in the viewport) but still appeared as if nothing changed. Today it seemed to work fine, so that's good at least and I'm confident I'll get the hang of it as I practice more.