Material Maker

Lights a tangent space normal map with a single directional light and outputs the Blinn-Phong specular highlight as a grayscale mask.

The point of view is static and orthographic, straight above the texture, so the highlight is baked for a fixed camera. This makes the node a good fit for UI elements, icons, stylized or isometric materials, and for driving a gloss, emission or blend mask, rather than for a PBR material that is lit by the engine at render time.

Parameters:

Angle — direction of the light in the texture plane, 0 is right, 90 is up. Elevation — height of the light above the plane. The highlight peaks on slopes tilted by (90 - Elevation) / 2, so 90 lights the flat areas and lower values move the highlight onto the slopes facing the light. Sharpness — the specular exponent, from a wide soft sheen to a small sharp glint. Bump — multiplies the slope of the input normal before lighting. Raise it when the relief is too shallow for the highlight to show up. The Z component of the normal is reconstructed from XY instead of being read from the blue channel, so shallow, rescaled or two channel normal maps still give a usable result. Surfaces facing away from the light are cut to black.