Mike Abbott

eikonoklastes
I'm not seeing them as a tool you use to actually light your scene with.

Neither am I. I just wish Sidefx would put a little more effort into refining the UX. These sort of issues, while in many respects minor, add irritation and friction and could be easily avoided with some basic testing, feedback and revision. It's frustrating when this is a good and helpful feature overall.

Thankfully the major initial bugs have been fixed, but there are a few things that don't seem thought out IMO:

1. Physical sky
Do you like everything orange? It may be 'technically correct' in terms of absolute colour temperature, but human perception corrects that in reality. In display prefs there are all sorts of physical sky work light controls - apart from the one I think is really needed - saturation. Maybe it's a branding thing

2. No display preferences for ambient occlusion or shadows.
It would be great to be able to have AO or shadows set up for some work lights but not others in display prefs. So switching from one work light to another type would switch those features as well by default. That's not available. So to switch those features you've got the go to the viewport work light drop down twice - to change the work light, and back to switch AO or shadows if you want those. Having those features available as a display pref, with viewport dropdown as an override would be better IMO.

Or maybe I'm missing something?

Thanks for your generosity in sharing this. I'm always happy to see more CAD / hard surface modelling related tools!