Limited number of lightsources ?

[DjangoCharango]

Is the numbers of lightsources (pointlight, directional ...) you can add to a 3-dimensional scene limited in some way?

I am trying to figure out, why some lightsources in my scene are being rendered, while others are not.

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[stalgiag]

Hi @DjangoCharango yes there is a limit to the number of lighting uniforms that mobile devices and browsers support. So the hard limit is 5 per type at any one time.

Thanks for pointing this out. It is clear that this should be documented better.

I am going to add a help wanted label. The todo is to add a note in the inline reference for each of the lighting functions that explains that a sketch only supports a maximum of five lights of each type.

This should be done with:

• directionalLight()
• pointLight()
• spotLight()

[DjangoCharango]

Thanks a lot for your answer. My Tests show, that I can have 9 pointLights in Chrome. Do you know, where I could find more information, on how many light sources, browsers support ?

[stalgiag]

If you are using a version <= 10.2 of p5 then you will have an upper limit of 8. Not sure how you are getting 9.

Version 1.0 will have a limit of 5 lights. This is because the number of uniforms is limited to 64 in iOS. We do not adjust the number of uniforms based on the browser/device, so these limitations will apply to all sketches made with p5. You can view this PR for more info.. Also here is the relevant shader.

If you are targeting a specific hardware/browser combo that allows more uniforms (such as desktop or android) and you need a large number of lights, you can change the array lengths in the shader and build p5 from source.

[blackboxlogic]

I came here to report the same problem five years later, found this issue marked done, found the merged PR... but the documentation for directionalLight doesn't mention the 5-per-type limit. maybe I should open a new issue?