OpenGL Programming Guide

Chapter 6Lighting

Creating Light Sources

Position and Attenuation

As previously mentioned, you can choose whether to have a light source that's treated as though it's located infinitely far away from the scene or one that's nearer to the scene. The first type is referred to as an directional light source; the effect of an infinite location is that the rays of light can be considered parallel by the time they reach an object. An example of a real-world directional light source is the sun. The second type is called a positional light source, since its exact position within the scene determines the effect it has on a scene and, specifically, the direction from which the light rays come. A desk lamp is an example of a positional light source. You can see the difference between directional and positional lights in Figure J-16 .

The light used in Example 6-1 is a directional one:

GLfloat light_position[] = { 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0 };
glLightfv(GL_LIGHT0, GL_POSITION, light_position);

As shown, you supply a vector of four values (x, y, z, w) for the GL_POSITION parameter. If the last value, w, is zero, the corresponding light source is a directional one, and the (x, y, z) values describe its direction. This direction is transformed by the modelview matrix just as it would be if it described a normal vector. By default, GL_POSITION is (0, 0, 1, 0), which defines a directional light that points along the negative z-axis. (Note that nothing prevents you from creating a directional light with the direction of (0, 0, 0), but such a light won't help you much.)

If the w value is nonzero, the light is positional, and the (x, y, z) values specify the location of the light in homogeneous object coordinates (see Appendix G ). This location is transformed by the modelview matrix and stored in eye coordinates. See "Controlling a Light's Position and Direction" for more information about how to control the transformation of the light's location. Also, by default, a positional light radiates in all directions, but you can restrict it to producing a cone of illumination by defining the light as a spotlight. The next section, "Spotlights," explains how to define a light as a spotlight.

Remember that the colors across the face of a smooth-shaded polygon are determined by the colors calculated for the vertices. Because of this, you probably want to avoid using large polygons with local lights - if you locate the light near the middle of the polygon, the vertices might be too far away to receive much light, so the whole polygon will look darker than you intended. To avoid this problem, break up the large polygon into smaller ones.

For real-world lights, the intensity of light decreases as distance from the light increases. Since a directional light is infinitely far away, it doesn't make sense to attenuate its intensity over distance, so attenuation is disabled for a directional light. However, you might want to attenuate the light from a positional light. OpenGL attenuates a light source by multiplying the contribution of that source by an attenuation factor:

where

d = distance between the light's position and the vertex

kc = GL_CONSTANT_ATTENUATION

kl = GL_LINEAR_ATTENUATION

kq = GL_QUADRATIC_ATTENUATION

By default, kc is 1.0 and both kl and kq are zero, but you can give these parameters different values:

glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_CONSTANT_ATTENUATION, 2.0);
glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_LINEAR_ATTENUATION, 1.0);
glLightf(GL_LIGHT0, GL_QUADRATIC_ATTENUATION, 0.5);

Note that the ambient, diffuse, and specular contributions are all attenuated. Only the emission and global ambient values aren't attenuated.

OpenGL Programming Guide