I've been practicing making and lighting simple scenes using just Blender, GLUT, OpenGL and C. I really like that I can go from two empty pages to a lit low-poly scene in like two hours. I use tiny_obj_loader to turn my .obj file into a list of positions/normals/uvs/indices. The problem is I always have to place my lights by hand (that is, code) in each scene.

I know .obj is only supposed to contain static meshes and not light positions or anything else... but is there some simple hack I am overlooking? Some sort of dummy object I can use to represent my light position and direction (and maybe more)?

What is the most common way to handle this, outside of using bigger formats or using custom formats?

Again, I'm not trying to make a game or an engine or anything I just really like making these quick sketches and I think it would be cool if I could place my lights in Blender instead of vim.

Thanks!

This is maye a stupid question, but that would only give me position, right? That is I couldn't use that for a directional light, could I?

Yes, I love it. Answers my next question as well, I just realized I can use X/Y/Z dimensions of the box as diff-intensity/spec-intensity/falloff! Well, I guess that only makes sense if I wrote a script that converted lights to boxes in Blender, but still... Thanks!