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Lighting 🌞

The settings on this page control how your material understands and reacts to the light in the world around it. From the fundamental calculation of light colour and direction to the stylised shading of toon lighting, this is where you define how your material will look in different lighting conditions.

Lighting Model 💡​

This determines the core "flavour" of how light is calculated, where it comes from, and how intense it is.

  • Light Colour Mode: This changes the fundamental method the shader uses to calculate the colour and intensity of ambient (indirect) light. Different popular shaders have their own unique "feel," and this setting allows you to choose a lighting style that best fits your project or matches the aesthetic of other shaders.
    • Backlace: The default, balanced lighting model.
    • PoiCustom, OpenLit, Standard, Mochie: These modes emulate the lighting styles of other popular shaders for a consistent look.
  • Light Direction Mode: It controls the perceived direction of the main light source.
    • Backlace: Uses the default light direction from the world's main directional light.
    • Forced World Direction: Lets you set a single, consistent light direction, no matter where the world's light is.
    • View Direction: The light direction comes from the camera's point of view.
  • Intensity Sliders: These control how strong different types of light are on your material.
    • RT Direct Intensity: Controls the strength of real-time directional lights.
    • RT Indirect Intensity: Controls the strength of ambient light from skyboxes and reflection probes.
    • RT Vertex Intensity: Controls lights that affect vertices (less common, but used in some worlds).
    • RT Additive Intensity: Controls the strength of additional real-time lights in the scene (point lights, etc.).
    • Baked Direct/Indirect Intensity: These control the intensity of baked light from lightmaps in worlds.
  • Indirect Override / Fallback Mode: Sometimes, the reflection probes in a world aren't quite right for your avatar. These settings are your escape hatch! Indirect Override lets you force the use of your own Fallback Cubemap for reflections, ensuring your material always has the reflections you want. Fallback Mode will only use it if no other probe is found.

Anime Lighting 🌠​

This is the heart and soul of Backlace! Make pretty anime characters..

  • Enable Anime Lighting: When this is enabled, the shader will use one of the modes below instead of the standard PBR diffuse calculation.
  • Anime Mode: This lets you choose between using a texture-based ramp for more artistic control or a procedural method for a clean, sharp look.

Ramp Mode​

Ramp Mode uses a texture, called a ramp, to define the gradient from light to shadow.

  • Toon Ramp: The texture that defines your light-to-shadow gradient. The left side is for shadowed areas, and the right side is for lit areas.
  • Ramp Colour: A colour tint that will be multiplied with your ramp texture.
  • Ramp Offset: This slider shifts the ramp, effectively making the shadowed areas larger or smaller.
  • Shadow Intensity: Controls how dark the darkest parts of the ramp are, giving you control over the shadow's contrast.
  • Occlusion Offset Intensity: Use your model's ambient occlusion map to add more depth to the shadows.
  • Ramp Min: Sets a "floor" colour for the ramp, preventing shadows from becoming pure black and losing detail.
  • Apply Normals to Intensity: A subtle effect that uses the model's normal map to influence the ramp's intensity.

Procedural Mode​

For a sharp and modern anime look, the procedural mode creates the shadow steps mathematically instead of using a texture.

  • Core Shadow Colour: The colour of the main, darkest shadow.
  • Core Shadow Threshold: The cutoff point where the light ends and the main shadow begins.
  • Halftone Colour: The colour of the mid-tone, or secondary shadow, that sits between the lit and core shadow areas.
  • Halftone Threshold: The cutoff point where the halftone shadow begins.
  • Shadow Softness: Controls the sharpness of the blend between the lit, halftone, and core shadow areas.
  • Occlusion To Shadow: Similar to the ramp mode, this uses the ambient occlusion map to add more depth and variation to the procedural shadows.

Shared Features​

These effects work with both Ramp and Procedural mode.

Ambient Gradient​

This simulates coloured light bouncing from the sky above and the ground below.

  • Enable Ambient Gradient: Toggles the feature on or off.
  • Sky Ambient & Threshold: The colour of the light coming from above, and the point at which it begins to apply.
  • Ground Ambient & Threshold: The colour of the light coming from below, and the point at which it begins to apply.
  • Gradient Intensity: The overall strength of the ambient gradient effect.

Area Tinting​

This allows you to apply a specific colour tint to either the lit or shadowed parts of your model. It's perfect for warming up highlights or cooling down shadows to fit a specific mood.

  • Tint Mask Source: This determines how the shader decides what is a "lit" or "shadowed" area for tinting.
  • Lit Area Tint & Coverage: The colour to apply to lit areas, and how much of the lit area it should cover.
  • Shadow Area Tint & Coverage: The colour to apply to shadowed areas, and how much of the shadowed area it should cover.

SDF Shadows​

SDF (Signed Distance Field) shadows provide a way to create perfectly shaped, artistic shadows on complex surfaces like anime faces. Instead of relying purely on geometry, this uses a specialized texture to dictate exactly how the shadow should flow as the light moves around the character, ensuring a clean look even at extreme angles.

  • Enable SDF Shadow: Toggles the SDF shadow calculation on or off.
  • SDF Shadow Texture: The input texture containing the signed distance field data, usually mapped to the character's face. The shader automatically handles flipping the texture coordinates based on whether the light is coming from the left or right side of the model.
  • SDF Shadow Threshold: Controls the "weight" of the shadow. This adjusts the point at which the shadow begins to transition, effectively allowing you to make the shadow cover more or less of the surface.
  • SDF Shadow Softness: Controls the sharpness of the shadow's edge. Set this to a very low value for a crisp, traditional toon look, or increase it for a softer, more modern anime aesthetic.

Light Limiting 🎛️​

Sometimes, a world's lighting can be a little bit dramatic. This section gives you the power to control the minimum and maximum brightness of the light that affects your material.

  • Enable Base/Add Pass Limit: Toggles the light limiting for the main light (Base) and any additional lights (Add) in the scene.
  • Base/Add Light Min: Sets the absolute minimum brightness for the light. This is great for preventing your avatar from becoming completely black in dark worlds.
  • Base/Add Light Max: Sets the absolute maximum brightness. This is perfect for preventing your avatar from getting blown out and losing detail in overly bright worlds.
  • Greyscale Lighting: This slider removes colour from the incoming light, turning it into a neutral white light.
  • Force Light Colour: This allows you to completely override the world's light colour with one of your own choosing.

Emission 🔥​

Emission makes your material glow, as if it's emitting its own light. It's perfect for glowing eyes, magical markings, sci-fi tech, or anything you want to stand out.

  • Enable Emission: Toggles the glow on or off.
  • Emission Colour: The colour of the glow. You can make this an HDR colour to create a bloom effect with post-processing.
  • Emission Map: A texture that acts as a mask for the emission. White areas on the map will glow at full intensity, black areas won't glow at all, and grey areas will glow somewhere in between.
  • Use Albedo for Emission: A useful slider that blends your Main Texture colour into the emission colour.
  • Emission Strength: The overall brightness and intensity of the glow.