shadow
The shadow component enables shadows for an entity and its children. Receiving shadows from surrounding objects and casting shadows onto other objects may (and often should) be enabled independently.
Without this component, an entity will not cast nor receive shadows.
Example
The example below configures a tree model to cast shadows onto the surrounding scene but not receive shadows itself.
<a-entity light="type:directional; castShadow:true;" position="1 1 1"></a-entity> |
IMPORTANT: Adding the shadow component alone is not enough to display
shadows in your scene. We must have at least one light with castShadow: true enabled. Additionally, the light’s shadow camera (used for depth
projection) usually must be configured correctly. Refer to the light
component for more information.
Properties
| Property | Description | Default Value |
|---|---|---|
| cast | Whether the entity casts shadows onto the surrounding scene. | true |
| receive | Whether the entity receives shadows from the surrounding scene. | true |
Scene Properties
The shadow system exposes scene-level properties for configuring the renderer
for shadows. These are set on <a-scene> (e.g., <a-scene shadow="autoUpdate: false">).
| Property | Description | Default Value |
|---|---|---|
| enabled | Whether to disable shadows globally, even if there is a shadow component and a light with castShadow: true enabled. |
true |
| autoUpdate | Whether to dynamically update the shadow map every frame. Disable and manually update by setting renderer.shadowMap.needsUpdate = true for best performance. Calculating shadow maps is expensive. |
true |
| type | Shadow type. One of pcf, basic, pcfsoft. |
pcf (percentage closer filtering) |