3D Graphics Programming with QuickDraw 3D 1.5.4

Ambient Light

Ambient light is an amount of light of a specific color that is added to the illumination of all surfaces in a scene. QuickDraw 3D supports at most one active source of ambient light per view, which is therefore called the ambient light object (or the ambient light). An ambient light has no location and cannot therefore cast shadows or become attenuated by distance of the light source from a surface. In effect, ambient light is light that is applied equally everywhere in a scene. In the absence of any other light sources, an ambient light illuminates a scene with a flat, uniform light. An ambient light is defined by the TQ3LightData data structure.