Lights
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Incari has three types of Light Objects: the Spot Light, the Point Light, and the Directional Light.
The Point Light is omnidirectional, meaning that light is emitted equally in all directions; the Spot Light is directional and will only light the area that it is rotated towards; and when a Directional Light is used, the rays of light are parallel to each other, illuminating as if from a far off distance and lighting objects equally, like the sun. Additionally, unlike Point Light, Spot Light and Directional Light support shadow mapping and have an extra set of Attributes for that purpose.
Color
✔
✔
✔
Brightness
✔
✔
✔
Attenuation
✔
✔
✘
Radial Falloff
✔
✘
✘
Shadow Mapping
✔
✘
✔
Color determines the color of the light being emitted.
Please note that the Color Attribute's brightness level will affect the brightness of the light itself. It is recommended that you always have the brightness level set to 1 and use the actual Brightness Attribute to alter the intensity of the light.
Color's alpha level has no effect.
Brightness governs the intensity of the light, with lower values giving less intense light emission and vice versa.
Attenuation relates to the spread, or reach, of the light. Lower levels only illuminate close Objects, whereas high levels allow the light to reach Objects that are further away.
Radial Falloff is used to change the smoothness of the light falloff. Lower levels will give a smoother transition between light and dark areas, but will be darker overall. Higher levels give a more contrasting light-to-dark transition and will appear comparatively brighter.
This Attribute is only available on the Spot Light Object.
Shadow Mapping is a performant method of approximating shadows in real-time. Without getting too technical, Shadow Mapping takes the depth and normal passes of the Scene from the perspective of the Spot Light or Directional Light, calculates which areas are occluded, and projects the shadow map onto the Scene.
There is no 'one size fits all' setup for Shadow Mapping. It is invariably a matter of tweaking and adjusting to achieve the desired visual result for your Scene, as well as meeting the performance requirements of your Project.
Shadow Mapping can be turned off/on using the Enable switch. Whether or not you use this effect often comes down to performance. If you are having performance issues, then you should consider removing the effect, or adjusting the other settings.
Resolution alters the size of the shadow map. Just like with normal 2D textures, higher resolutions produce better quality, at the cost of increasing processing time and file size.
Kernel Size relates to the size of each sampled area during the calculation. It is a fairly complex subject, but it basically affects the smoothness of the shadow map. Lower levels give crisp, but jagged, shadows; higher levels give smoother, but less defined results.
Increased Kernel Size may help improve results that suffer from shadow acne or reduce artifacts in cases where the shadow map Resolution is low.
As stated above, Shadow Mapping takes passes from the Light's perspective. Like the Clip Near Attribute of Camera, everything within the defined distance isn't rendered and is therefore excluded from those passes and the Shadow Mapping algorithm.
Offset offsets the depth of the shadow map and can massively improve its appearance by reducing shadow acne. It is recommended that you increase this value by very small increments (0.0001), until you get an acceptable reduction in artifacts.
Due to the effect Offset has on the Shadow Mapping algorithm, higher values can cause shadows to appear to become disconnected from the geometry that casts them.
