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Using Shadowless Lights

Light sources can be assigned the shadowless keyword and no shadows will be cast due to its presence in a scene. Sometimes, scenes are difficult to illuminate properly using the lights we have chosen to illuminate our objects. It is impractical and unrealistic to apply a higher ambient value to the texture of every object in the scene. So instead, we would place a couple of fill lights around the scene. Fill lights are simply dimmer lights with the shadowless keyword that act to boost the illumination of other areas of the scene that may not be lit well. Let's try using one in our scene.

Remember the three colored area spotlights? We go back and un-comment them and comment out any other lights we have made. Now we add the following:

  light_source {

    <0, 20, 0>

    color Gray50

    shadowless

  }

This is a fairly dim light 20 units over the center of the scene. It will give a dim illumination to all objects including the plane in the background. We render it and see.

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