There are many tutorials on Youtube that use both these methods for lighting and I can’t really tell the difference between them two. Based on your experiences, which one is more effective?
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Lighting and Rendering”
I don’t know what all the differences are, but if you use mesh lighting, you can shape your light source. try using suzanne as your light source, and it will look considerably different than if you used a plane.
So say if you were to make a lamp in some kind of shape, mesh lighting would be the best? What about normal sunlight lighting?
some info here:
I tend to use mesh lighting for major light sources, and point lamps for tiny lights, as the path tracer can go really bad with many mesh lights. I’ve never used plane lights, and as you can see in link above, lights without depth produce typically undesired effect (dark streaks). A mesh light I can extrude if that effect is visible.
For outdoor lighting, I guess sunlight combined with sky, and/or HDRI based lighting. Example setup here, which allows me to force shadows from HDRI’s that doesn’t go high enough in their exposure values (most). I don’t typically do outdoor scenes though.
For indoor sunlight through a visible pane, I tend to go with something like this, which allows me the visual flexibility I need.
In both, I use the sunposition addon.
Many mesh/plane lights, especially small ones, should be avoided like the plague due to noise.
Ah I see, do you have any guides or tutorials explaining more about this stuff? I’m still a beginner haha
Also can HDRI be used for lighting? or is it just used for reflections?
Yes, a good HDRI map can be used alone or with other lights to light a scene.
There’s tons of info & vids about this: put “blender image based lighting” into your favorite search engine 
Of course, cheers for the tips guys!