light-scene

Cinematic rendering

A polished frame is lit and graded, not just populated. Treat lighting, sky, shadows, tone mapping, and post as one pass over the assembled scene, and tune every value against a real screenshot rather than from memory.

Prefer shipped building blocks over hand-written shaders and passes. Discover them with the reuse-scripts skill and adapt the closest official example with find-examples:

• the core CameraFrame helper for tone mapping, ambient occlusion, bloom, vignette, and grade;
• a procedural sky and image-based light for ambient colour and reflections;
• a shadow catcher for grounding subjects that have no lit floor.

For an outdoor scene with water, stop before authoring the scene and read both reuse-scripts and find-examples. Use graphics/water.example.mjs as the initial composition recipe: it already joins the production Water script, sky, sun, CameraFrame, water layer, scene depth, and reflection pipeline. Get that complete frame rendering before replacing its assets or tuning its look. A custom normal-mapped material, tessellated plane, or reflection-coloured mesh is not the baseline and does not substitute for Water when the brief asks for reflective water.

Keep the two named production integrations visible in the implementation:

• import and create Water from playcanvas/scripts/esm/water.mjs on the water entity, preserving the example's required render component, camera reference, water layer, depth map, and textures;
• construct CameraFrame from playcanvas for the gameplay camera, set a deliberate tone map and restrained grade, call update(), and destroy it with the application.

Do not continue to cosmetic tuning while either integration is missing or diagnostics report a shader, texture, or framebuffer error.

Stylized and prebaked scenes

When the art direction is deliberately flat or stylized rather than photoreal, or the platform's startup, frame, or payload budget rules out the runtime pipeline above, do not treat Water, CameraFrame, and the sky/IBL bake as mandatory. The sanctioned alternative is baked static lighting via the bake-lighting skill plus custom material shading via the override-shader-chunks skill. Either way, dynamic objects and their attachments must sample or approximate the baked occlusion so they dim to the same levels as the baked surfaces, grounded with contact shadows. Fall back to the runtime pipeline above as the default path when neither trigger holds.