Adding lights

Creating lights for Maya helps create a mood for your scene, as well as allowing the models within your rendered scene be viewable through light source.

To begin, inserting the first light is required. This is under the 'Create' menu within the 'Rendering' menu set up.

As shown in the screenshot, there are all types of light for the animations scene. For this example I will be using 'Area light' 

Once the first light has been created, it can be adjusted via position, scale and rotation - like all other objects in Maya. 

To see how your scene appears with the lights which have been added into the scene, go to 'Lighting/Use selected lights' This will show how the animations render will look with your lights, in the above shot no lights are selected - showing that the model will be completely dark. 

This is a screenshot with all three lights I have created (using shift+D for duplication) for the scene. As you can see, a strong light casts a strong shadow on the left side of the model. If I were to desire a less dramatically lit scene, these lights would be sparsely placed throughout the entire area of the scene, the left and back as well as the top.