Introduction
Similar to how the real world would be dark without lights, we require simulated lights to see in our virtual worlds. Visual applications will be incomplete without the presence of lights. There are several kinds of lights; for example, point lights, directional lights, spot lights, and so on. Each of these have some common properties, for example, light position. In addition, they have some specific properties, such as spot direction and spot exponent for spot lights. We will cover all of these light types as well as how to implement them in the vertex shader stage or the fragment shader stage.
Although we can leave the lights to just light the environment, our visual system will start to find problems with such a setting. This is because our eyes are not used to seeing objects lit but casting no shadows. In addition, without shadows, it is very difficult to judge how near or far an object is to the other. Therefore, we detail several shadow generation techniques varying from...
