Documentation / Node reference / geo nodes

geo/SpotLight

A cone of light cast from a point, like a stage spot or a torch.

Lights

Shines along the node's forward axis; aim it with an upstream transform (geo/PolarTransform points it at the origin). The cone is fully lit up to innerCone and fades to nothing over the outerCone band beyond it. Intensity falls off with distance following decay and reaches zero at distance. Shadows are rendered with a perspective camera matching the cone.

Parameters

Name Type What it does
color Color Light color.
intensity Float Light brightness. Scales the color's contribution.
decay Float How fast the intensity falls with distance. 2 is the physically correct inverse-square falloff. 0 keeps the intensity constant.
distance Float Reach of the light, in world units. The contribution fades to zero at this distance. 0 means unlimited.
innerCone Float Half-angle of the fully lit cone, in degrees.
outerCone Float Width of the falloff band beyond innerCone, in degrees. The light reaches zero at innerCone plus outerCone.
displayHelper UInt8 ONLY_IN_EDITOR · ALWAYS · NEVER When to draw the light's viewport helper.
helperSize Float Scale of the viewport helper. Display only.
castShadow Bool Whether this light casts shadows. The shadow params below only apply when this is on.
resolution Vector2UInt Shadow map size, in texels. Higher is sharper and costs more memory. It does not change how soft the shadow reads: bias and normalBias are expressed in texels and softness is a fraction of the light's frustum, so the shadow keeps its proportions when the resolution changes.
near Float Closest distance the shadow camera records. Casters closer to the light than this are not in the shadow map.
far Float Farthest distance the shadow camera records. Casters beyond it are not in the shadow map. Near and far only bound the recorded range: shadow position, contact and bias behavior do not depend on them.
bias Float Manual depth-bias adjustment, in units of 8 shadow-map texels. Leave at 0 for most scenes: an automatic bias (a small floor plus a slope-scaled term) already prevents self-shadowing. Negative values pull the shadow tighter to the contact point, at the risk of surface acne. Positive values push it away from the caster. The effect is independent of the near/far range.
normalBias Float Offsets the shadow lookup along the surface normal, in shadow-map texels. The default of 1 clears residual acne on curved surfaces. Large values visibly shift the shadow away from the caster.
amount Float Shadow strength. 1 is a full shadow, 0 removes the darkening entirely.
filterMode UInt8 HARD · PCF · SOFT HARD is a single crisp comparison per pixel. PCF blurs the edge with a fixed-radius filter. SOFT is PCSS: the penumbra is sharp at contact and widens with the caster-to-receiver distance. PCF and SOFT both take their width from softness.
softness Float Apparent size of this light source, and so how soft its shadow is. Larger is softer, 0 is a hard edge. One number for every shadow the light casts: the PCF blur radius under filterMode PCF, the penumbra width under SOFT, and the light's angular width on an SDF object, which marches its own field instead of reading the map and so softens whatever castShadow says. It is a fraction of the light's frustum, not a count of texels, so raising the shadow resolution sharpens the map without narrowing the soft edge. The same value does not read as equally soft in PCF and in SOFT: SOFT scales it by the caster-to-receiver distance.

Examples

Scenes you can open in the editor that teach this node.

See also

This page is generated from the engine, so it describes the release you can download. The same text is in the editor's Help panel next to the node itself.