Object3D → Light →

DirectionalLight

A light that gets emitted in a specific direction. This light will behave as though it is infinitely far away and the rays produced from it are all parallel. The common use case for this is to simulate daylight; the sun is far enough away that its position can be considered to be infinite, and all light rays coming from it are parallel.

This light can cast shadows - see the DirectionalLightShadow page for details.

A Note about Position, Target and rotation

A common point of confusion for directional lights is that setting the rotation has no effect. This is because Verge3D's DirectionalLight is the equivalent to what is often called a 'Target Direct Light' in other applications.

This means that its direction is calculated as pointing from the light's position to the target's position (as opposed to a 'Free Direct Light' that just has a rotation component).

The reason for this is to allow the light to cast shadows - the shadow camera needs a position to calculate shadows from.

See the target property below for details on updating the target.

Code Example


    // White directional light at half intensity shining from the top.
    const directionalLight = new v3d.DirectionalLight(0xffffff, 0.5);
    scene.add(directionalLight);

Examples

controls / fly
effects / parallaxbarrier
effects / stereo
geometry / extrude / splines
materials / bumpmap

Constructor

DirectionalLight(color : Integer, intensity : Float)

color - (optional) hexadecimal color of the light. Default is 0xffffff (white).
intensity - (optional) numeric value of the light's strength/intensity. Default is 1.

Creates a new DirectionalLight.

Properties

See the base Light class for common properties.

# .castShadow : Boolean

If set to true light will cast dynamic shadows. Warning: This is expensive and requires tweaking to get shadows looking right. See the DirectionalLightShadow for details. The default is false.

# .isDirectionalLight : Boolean

Read-only flag to check if a given object is of type DirectionalLight.

# .position : Vector3

This is set equal to Object3D.DefaultUp (0, 1, 0), so that the light shines from the top down.

# .shadow : DirectionalLightShadow

A DirectionalLightShadow used to calculate shadows for this light.

# .target : Object3D

The DirectionalLight points from its position to target.position. The default position of the target is (0, 0, 0).
Note: For the target's position to be changed to anything other than the default, it must be added to the scene using


    scene.add(light.target);

This is so that the target's matrixWorld gets automatically updated each frame.

It is also possible to set the target to be another object in the scene (anything with a position property), like so:


    const targetObject = new v3d.Object3D();
    scene.add(targetObject);

    light.target = targetObject;

The directionalLight will now track the target object.

Methods

See the base Light class for common methods.

# .dispose () : undefined

Frees the GPU-related resources allocated by this instance. Call this method whenever this instance is no longer used in your app.

# .copy (source : DirectionalLight) : this

Copies value of all the properties from the source to this DirectionalLight.

Source

For more info on how to obtain the source code of this module see this page.