I started a project which I had in my mind for quite some time now. Triggered by an article about product visualization, which uses fake lighting, I decided to finally give it a try myself.
I created a thread in blenderartists to show the various stages of my progress and will probably post a tutorial, if anything useful come out of this.
Right now this technique seems only applicable for studio setups and animations, where no camera movement is involved, but maybe I can come up with extended applications.
Here is a quick animation to show the technique
Fake Lighting Test from loramel on Vimeo.