In Maya, lighting is the art of placing virtual lights (such as spotlights and directional lights) to shape mood, time, and emotion, and to control their color, intensity, and direction. At the same time, rendering is the final, complex process that calculates all scene data—models, textures, lights, cameras—to generate a final, photorealistic 2D image or sequence of images from your 3D scene, turning your digital creation into something you can see.