JSoft

If you haven't found it yet, be sure to read the bible of CG cinematic lighting: https://chrisbrejon.com/cg-cinematography/ And also a short one on why 3-point lighting is a bad habit: https://cg-masters.com/cg-lighting-myth-1-3-point-lighting-is-good/ I tend to use HDRIs as a weak "fill" light for a starting point based on the mood of the scene - warm/cool, high/low contrast, saturation, etc. You'll often find HDRIs categorized this way on sites likes HDRI Haven. The rest depends on manual placement of lights through experimentation and reference. The key driver is how you want the scene to feel, and it doesn't matter if it takes 1 dome light or 100 spot lights.

This one's tricky because of how mograph selections don't re-sort the indexes and only hides them. Scalar User Data: MoGraph ID Normalized > Change Range: 0 - 1 to 0 - # of polys in selection > MultiShader: Integer Loop. Only thing I can't figure out is how to procedurally get the poly count out of the scene nodes random select into the out max of the Change Range shader node. Multishader Selection.c4d

Not sure if you still need help with this but Redshift/RoyalRender user here for the past 6 years or so. Setting this up is a bit confusing but you're on the right track. In your local preferences folder (c:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\Cinema_Version) you'll find a settings.userinstallation.json file. This stores the path of the shared asset database that you set up to use locally. The next step is to copy that .json file to a shared location and edit the Royal Render environment to use that shared prefs location. The RR docs explain how to edit your environment variables but again it can be a little confusing with all of the files involved. In the RR install folder the environment files are in //RoyalRender/render_apps/_setenv/all. There is an environment config for each 3D app so look for the cinema 4d*.rrEnv ones. Note that the only one you should create/edit is the cinema 4d__inhouse.rrenv file. This is your custom environment that remains untouched by any RR updates. Add the g_userprefs = Z:\PATH_TO_SHARED_PREFS line to this file. All Royal Render clients will now use that shared prefs directory and the corresponding asset database(s) that are defined in the .json file.