How does lights work in DirectX?

Direct3D provides a small number of lights that you can turn on and off at any time. A light can be one of three types(point lights,directional lights, and spotlights). Direct3D emit three colors that are used independently in the system's lighting computations: a diffuse color, an ambient color, and a specular color. Each is incorporated by the Direct3D lighting module, interacting with a counterpart from the current material to produce a final color used in rendering.

Direct3D Light Model covers ambient, diffuse, specular, and emissive lighting. The total amount of light in a scene is the global illumination and it is computed using the following equation.

Global Illumination = Ambient Light + Diffuse Light + Specular Light

Ambient light is the general light level that falls uniformly throughout your scene, like daylight in an outdoor scene; Diffuse light is the standard 'color' of a material; Specular light are the bright spots you see on shiny objects; Emissive Lighting is light that is emitted by an object, for example, a glow.

Also Light can have a number of properties depending on the type of light such as position,Direction, Range and Attenuation.

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