How do you create your own lights and materials?

Dimension is not a creation tool so most things have to be made in other applications and brought in for compositing and rendering.

Lights

Dimension supports .ibl, .hdr, and .exr formats for lighting.  Most Image Based Lights are captured in 360 images with special equipment.  There are also some software applications for creating studio lights such as HDRI Studio.  You can technically load any image and we will auto-generate an image based light from it as well though .jpg and .png images naturally are not high dynamic range and won't have as nice lighting and reflection information.

Materials

All of the materials in Dimension are presets which can be customized but at the moment there is no way to save those presets as your own custom materials.  We plan to add that in the future!

If you want to create standalone materials that can be used on any surface (such as the presets that ship with Dimension) Allegorithmic Substance Designer is a great option.  If you want to create materials specific for a model with details on certain areas Substance Painter is another great tool.  Both of these have the ability to export to the Adobe Standard Material version of .mdl which is our supported material type.