[Feature] Affect ShadowMaterial with ambient light

Questions
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1

Currently, threejs doesn’t provide a way to adjust the intensity of a shadow. this mentions that shadows can only be lighter by using ambient light.

However, I can only use ShadowMaterial since the mesh should be transparent but receives shadow. unfortunately, shadowmaterial doesn’t seem to be affected by ambient light.

what I am trying to do: currently, google map doesn’t receive shadows from objects inserted in to the scene using threejs. I worked around this by putting a transparent mesh on the ground that only receives shadow. so it would appear that the map tiles on the ground are receiving shadows.

ShadowMaterial seems to be a good option for this. but the downside is that, when the ambient light is intense and the directional light is weak, the shadow is still intense.

I understand your reason for not implementing shadow intensity. but can you at least make shadowMaterials be affected by ambient light?

it would be nice to know if there is a workaround in the meantime though.

2

Hi @yosan_melese I also need to handle the same as you, do you have any solution?

3

LightShadow: Add `intensity`. by Mugen87 · Pull Request #28588 · mrdoob/three.js · GitHub shadow intensity was merged in June, @Mugen87 does this mean we can adjust the shadow to be darker than it should be? For example a light with an intensity of 0.1 but shadowIntensity of say 100 would result in a tiny amount of light but intensely dark shadows for that particular light?

4

@felix-kami I think @Lawrence3DPK has already answered your question. But an easy workaround I did at the time was just to lower the opacity of the shadow material. That way you get smoother shadows.

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