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light
The light component defines the entity as a source of light. Light affects all materials that have not specified a flat shading model with
shader: flat
. Note that lights are computationally expensive we should limit number of lights in a scene.
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By default, A-Frame scenes inject default lighting, an ambient light and a directional light. These default lights are visible in the DOM with the
data-aframe-default-light
attribute. Whenever we add any lights, A-Frame removes the default lights from the scene.
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Properties
We will go through the different types of lights and their respective properties one by one.
Property | Description | Default Value |
---|---|---|
type | One of
ambient ,
directional ,
hemisphere ,
point ,
spot . |
directional |
color | Light color. | #fff |
intensity | Light strength. | 1.0 |
Ambient
Ambient lights globally affect all entities in the scene. The
color
and
intensity
properties define ambient lights. Additionally,
position
,
rotation
, and
scale
have no effect on ambient lights.
We recommend to have some form of ambient light such that shadowed areas are not fully black and to mimic indirect lighting.
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Directional
Directional lights are like a light source that is infinitely far away, but shining from a specific direction, like the sun. Thus, absolute position do not have an effect on the intensity of the light on an entity. We can specify the direction using the
position
component.
The example below creates a light source shining from the upper-left at a 45-degree angle. Note that because only the vector matters,
position="-100 100 0"
and
position="-1 1 0"
are the same.
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We can specify the direction of the directional light with its orientation by creating a child entity it targets. For example, pointing down its -Z axis:
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Hemisphere
Hemisphere lights are like an ambient light, but with two different colors, one from above (
color
) and one from below (
groundColor
). This can be useful for scenes with two distinct lighting colors (e.g., a grassy field under a gray sky).
|
Property | Description | Default Value |
---|---|---|
groundColor | Light color from below. | #fff |
Point
Point lights, unlike directional lights, are omni-directional and affect materials depending on their position and distance. Point likes are like light bulb. The closer the light bulb gets to an object, the greater the object is lit.
|
Property | Description | Default Value |
---|---|---|
decay | Amount the light dims along the distance of the light. | 1.0 |
distance | Distance where intensity becomes 0. If
distance is
0 , then the point light does not decay with distance. |
0.0 |
Spot
Spot lights are like point lights in the sense that they affect materials depending on its position and distance, but spot lights are not omni-directional. They mainly cast light in one direction, like the Bat-Signal.
|
Property | Description | Default Value |
---|---|---|
angle | Maximum extent of spot light from its direction (in degrees). | 60 |
decay | Amount the light dims along the distance of the light. | 1.0 |
distance | Distance where intensity becomes 0. If
distance is
0 , then the point light does not decay with distance. |
0.0 |
penumbra | Percent of the spotlight cone that is attenuated due to penumbra. | 0.0 |
target | element the spot should point to. set to null to transform spotlight by orientation, pointing to it’s -Z axis. | null |