Product and car studio setups typically consists of two, three or lots of area lights with gradients mapped onto them. I usually add lights, rotate and scale them, create more or less sophisticated gradient ramps for reflections until I am happy and render the result. After client feedback, I try to incorporate all needed changes, changing the light setup a few times which results in quite a few different versions of light setups which I have to keep track of, especially if I am dealing with a studio pipeline and a 2D department.
One thing that makes life easier is HDR Lightstudio - it produces just one HDR map. Easy the make versions of, easy to reuse in other scenes, easier to manage instead of a whole set of lights on a busy production day.
Plus, the feature of adding a light relative to a geometry normal is often quite a time saver.
But it is expensive, clunky to handle and does not show the same result as the renderer.
It would be nice if there would be a special kind of domelight, a lightgroup that handles area lights geometry centered and provides a fast and solid way to turn them into cards with gradient ramps and/or textures mapped onto them. A possibility to place a light reflection relative to the camera with a click on the geometry. A ring light (like a top- and bottomless cylinder), that goes around the geometry wold be nice. And a long light card mapped to a spline, where the vertex points of the spline can be placed relative to the geometry normal to get the reflection of the lofted geometry.
The light should be treated as a single light by the renderer no matter how many cards/area lights/ramps/image backgrounds are included and there should be the possibility to bake the light into a HDR image. This would also make it renderer agnostic and portable to Maya and Houdini, for instance.
It would be cool, if multiple versions of the sun/sky system could be included, making it possible to switch the sun and the sky on and off with two different light sets, or create a dawn and a high noon setting. If this light could be used with include/exclude it would make light setup for complex scenes far easier.
