How It Works
The light properties dialog is activated whenever you select a light object. Lighting is crucial to a 3D scene, and care should be taken in the number and positioning of lights for a good quality/speed balance. Every mesh will need to be rendered against ambient light, and also against every light that falls within the range of it's bounding box.
Lights can have position (e.g. a bulb), direction (e.g. sunlight) or both position and direction (e.g. a torch). Lights with position will also be less bright over distance, so this means you need to define an attenuation curve. Paramters for this curve are set in this dialog, and are defined below.
Reference
This property sheet lets you configure a light's type, colour, range, and falloff parameters.
Type - The type of light that is emitted:-
directional - the simplest type of light that has just a direction (e.g. sunlight).
point - a light that has position, but emits equally in all directions (e.g. a light bulb).
spot - a light that has position and direction (e.g. a torch).
Colour - The colour of the light. A pure black light has no effect, whereas a pure white light is the brightest.
Max Range - The maximum distance over which the light has effect.
Attenuation - How the power of the light diminishes over the range.
Lighting attenuation is calculated by the following formula:-
attenuation = fConstant + fDistance * dL + fDistanceSq * dL * dL
...where:-
dL - the distance from a point to be lit to the light.
fConstant - the Constant value in the light settings.
fDistance - the Distance value in the light settings.
fDistanceSq - the D Squared value in the light settings.
Cone - For 'spot' lights only. The cone determines the angle of the beam from the light (from narrow to wide).