r3f-lighting

To set up lighting in React Three Fiber, combine ambient or hemisphere lights for base illumination with directional lights for shadows, and use drei Environment components to capture image-based lighting for enhanced scene realism.

To configure shadows in threejs, enable shadow maps on the renderer and lights, then optimize shadow map sizes to balance visual fidelity against rendering performance for production-ready applications.

Use environment lighting when you need realistic reflections and ambient color bleeding from a 360-degree image, whereas standard light types are better for direct, controllable illumination and sharp shadows.

To optimize 3D lighting performance, limit the number of dynamic lights, reduce shadow map sizes where high fidelity is unnecessary, and leverage environment lighting to decrease real-time rendering overhead.

The drei Stage helper provides pre-configured environment lighting and shadows, but you can integrate custom spot and rectArea lights within your React Three Fiber scene to achieve specific localized illumination and area lighting effects.