This short and simple tutorial is showing you about how to create light and shading for your Maya scene. The lighting and shading is important factor of modeling and it helps you to render your image with perfect combination. Sometime it happens that your scene looks dummy and dull just because of lack of lighting and shading. The lighting and shading effects is already plugged-in Maya and can be used in Maya projects.
The lighting affect is applied in the horizontal way of the scene so that it could create shadow of the object. It is general theory in Physics that shadow is produced only if an object came in the way of light origin. The rendering process will be fine if the lighting management will be excellent. So there we are need of proper light system. The lighting is also created with particle system and these particle set up is integrated in Maya. The particle system can perform many other jobs as well.
You can use these particles for wind, fire and water. All of them are just created with particle setup where you choose relevant particle for each task. The shading and lighting are both compulsory for one another. Here we use directional light for our scene because it captures overall scene. After its setting you will see the shadow of tree in the given video.