Homework 1
I didn't encounter any specific problems, though for later configurations (involving multiple lights), trying to setup the scene to exactly mimic the given rendering quickly became tedious. Instead of nudging a parameter, rendering, checking and repeating ad nauseum, I thought it might be faster to do some of the setting up in an environment that allowed more real-time manipulation. To that end, I found a head model that closely resembled the given model, and setup scenes in 3ds max in which I could perform a much faster version of the "change parameter->render->check" loop above. An example of one such scene: