# Area light on PBR materials and shadow casting ability **URL:** \ **Category:** Feature requests\ **Tags:** lighting\ **Created:** [May 7, 2025, 5:05pm UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299 "2025-05-07T17:05:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![tawibox](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex024/user_avatar/forum.babylonjs.com/tawibox/32/22881_2.png) [@tawibox](https://forum.babylonjs.com/u/tawibox)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2025, 5:05pm UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299/1 "2025-05-07T17:05:29Z")
Hey everyone, First off, a huge thank you for the new area light feature—@srzerbetto, incredible job! I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages 😄. I do have three more major feature requests that I’d love to see supported: 1. **Full PBR material integration** Area lights should respond correctly to all PBR material channels (both with or without textures)—roughness, normals, metallic, etc.—so textures behave as expected under area illumination. 2. **Shadow casting** Enable area lights to cast shadows just like directional lights, giving us more realistic and flexible lighting setups. 3. **Texture attachment on color channel** Allow static textures (e.g. gobos or gradients) to be applied directly to the area light’s color slot for added creative control. From my tests, none of these appear to be live yet—am I missing something? And if they’re already on the roadmap, is there an ETA for when we might see them? Thanks again for all the hard work! Tawibox ---
**Author:** ![sebavan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex024/user_avatar/forum.babylonjs.com/sebavan/32/57_2.png) [@sebavan](https://forum.babylonjs.com/u/sebavan)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2025, 5:35pm UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299/2 "2025-05-07T17:35:00Z")
1 should be done, do you have a repro as it feels like a bug ---
**Author:** ![Deltakosh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex024/user_avatar/forum.babylonjs.com/deltakosh/32/26635_2.png) [@Deltakosh](https://forum.babylonjs.com/u/Deltakosh)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2025, 5:53pm UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299/3 "2025-05-07T17:53:33Z")
And 2. is super high on @srzerbetto list ;D ---
**Author:** ![bvaisman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex024/user_avatar/forum.babylonjs.com/bvaisman/32/20835_2.png) [@bvaisman](https://forum.babylonjs.com/u/bvaisman)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2025, 1:48am UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299/4 "2025-05-08T01:48:07Z")
I agree… cf [Disc arealights and support of shadows in arealights](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/disc-arealights-and-support-of-shadows-in-arealights/57975) ---
**Author:** ![tawibox](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex024/user_avatar/forum.babylonjs.com/tawibox/32/22881_2.png) [@tawibox](https://forum.babylonjs.com/u/tawibox)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2025, 8:23pm UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299/5 "2025-05-28T20:23:34Z")
@sebavan Yes, I observed sth does feel like a bug for `rectAreaLight`. I created a separate post here: > [@Specular channel issue on Rectangular Area Light](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/specular-channel-issue-on-rectangular-area-light/58706): > > Hey community, @srzerbetto @sebavan @Deltakosh Been trying the new rectangular area light lately, and I found some potential issue: The specular of RectAreaLight seems not picking up the correct color values See test renders: The test contact sheets are organized as follows: Top row: Displays the new RectAreaLight, show… ---
**Author:** ![srzerbetto](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex024/user_avatar/forum.babylonjs.com/srzerbetto/32/20941_2.png) [@srzerbetto](https://forum.babylonjs.com/u/srzerbetto)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2026, 6:30pm UTC](https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/area-light-on-pbr-materials-and-shadow-casting-ability/58299/6 "2026-01-22T18:30:23Z")
@tawibox Yesterday we merged my PR that adds support for emission textures for area lights. I’m currently working on tooling and documentation but I think the emission property is already out for rectAreaLight if you want to give it a try. The current implementation requires pre-processing to be performed in the emission texture, so we added a utility class called “AreaLightTextureTools“ that can be used for that. It takes around 3s for a texture to be pre-processed so once you have the pre-processed version of you texture you can save it and use it directly in the light’s emissionTexture. Here is some sample code: [Babylon.js Playground](https://playground.babylonjs.com/#T7FXR8#102) As for the shadow support, we haven’t found a good implementation for it yet. So we currently don’t have roadmap for implementation.