CGI Lighting Artists illuminate 3D scenes so they render as photo-real or stylized images in feature films, episodic VFX, animated features, and AAA games. The work is technically demanding: setting up area lights, HDRI sky rigs, and practical emitters in Katana or Maya; assigning and balancing physically-based shaders in Arnold, Karma (Houdini), or RenderMan; tuning sample counts, ray-depth limits, and denoising passes to hit quality targets within render-farm budgets. Indian studios driving this market include DNEG India (Mumbai, Hyderabad), MPC (Bengaluru), Lakshya Digital (Gurugram), Tata Elxsi (Bengaluru, Chennai), Trace VFX (Mumbai), and Prime Focus World — all feeding Hollywood and global OTT pipelines. A lighting artist's output goes directly to compositors via multi-pass AOV renders (beauty, diffuse, specular, shadow, emission, depth, motion-vector), so understanding ACES color management, LUT pipelines, and what comp artists need from each pass is as important as making a scene look good in isolation.