Player1 needs help lighting
FWIW I'm a total Hammer noob and I followed the instructions on the wiki and were able to successfully create a map and run it in Portal 2 (a large part of the success was that the FGD they link include a sample VMF with a lot of entities already setup and working).
For some reason it just won't light properly, but maybe I'm not using the correct entities. As I said I'm a total noob when it comes to Source/Hammer. (Though I'm a game developer so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the concepts. I must say I find the whole Hammer edit / compile / play cycle to be a drag. I'm used to wysiwyg editing and press play to play in less than a second. But I'm hoping I can get used to it.)
Is the lighting not working whatsoever or are the shadows just bad? There are multiple reasons for each, so I think you should create a new thread so we can troubleshoot.
I had used a "light_spot" which I couldn't make work. Then I tried just a basic "light" which works fine (makes lightmaps and does HDR in engine) the only "problem" being that the Hammer "3d lighting preview" looks much darker than it does in-game. I've also tried "light_dynamic" without success. But no real need to troubleshoot yet since I'm not serious about mapping quite yet 
I think the troubleshooting I need is a link to a good "ok so you've never used Hammer before, so here's what's what"-guide and a "ok so you absolutely need to know about these entities"-guide 
The lighting preview is garbage, don't use it. It sounds like you have experience with UDK. Source uses a lot of precalculated lighting, so there really isn't a WYSIWYG method. Lighting, finalized lighting, is one of the last things you should worrk about. Basic light entities will be all you need while you just test things.
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Ooh you spawned it into a new thread. Might be a bit overkill but of course I won't say no to help
(I haven't done anything in UDK, but most of my development experience comes from Unity3D and earlier proprietary editor/engines that were pretty similar.)
Unity is rad as shit. But same thing really, neither engine has precalculated lighting like Source does.
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Okay going _slightly_ off-topic but Unity does have lightmapping. (That it's buggy as shit is another thing entirely.)
I concur with Player1, any tips of making decent lighting (right now I have whacked a light entity in the world along with an env_cubemap entity), it looks pretty crappy.
Check out my Portal 2 map, Entrapment!
http://forums.thinking.withportals.com/community-releases/entrapment-1-1-1-t2323.html
Play around with env_projectedtexture. You can only have one active at a time, but it allows you to have really good shadows and a dynamic spotlight. Make sure you enable shadows on it, though!
Personally I try to use light_spot more than just a normal light entity. You get more realistic lighting I think.
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