Building a portrait studio...

So I went to hastings yesterday and picked up a studio lighting book. It had a lot of things I hadn't even begun to think bout. The one question I really was getting bugged with is "WYSIWYG" ligthing. Since I would be using flash units, how do I set up the lighting if the lighting isn't applied until the instant I take the picture? Turns out the flash units (like the ones I want) come with a "modeling lamp" which is a lightbulb that is on and gives you an idea of how the light will be (although these us tungstun bulbs as far as I can tell, where as the actual flashes are balanced for daylight). In either case, this is exciting news and makes the idea of setting up studio lighting a whole lot easier to handle.

The nifty thing is I have a slight edge when it comes to setting up lighting and am not coming in "cold turkey". I have for many years used and played with a 3d modeling package called Truespace on the computer. The nifty thing bout that is you can set up lights etc in a 3d scene and then render it, since its raytraced rendering the lighting is quite accurate, so through using this program for other projects in the past I got a feel for setting light schemes up, after all it really is all about the lighting.

I just wonder now if in a 4 light set up if its all strobes:
Key Light
Fill light
hair light
background light.

Are these all strobes (flash) ? I am assuming the same lights I want I can control the flash intensity too, to make softer lights etc, and I am also assuming that some of these flashes allows me to add color gels to it to change the light (say for different background colors).

Oh well, just figured id toss this out there.