shadow

NOTE: This version of the documentation tracks unstable development happening on A-Frame’s master branch. If you wish to try it out, grab the unstable build. Otherwise, head to the documentation for the current 1.6.0 version

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>
<a-gltf-model src="tree.gltf" shadow="receive: false"></a-gltf-model>

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)