I’m embarrassed to say that I’m just getting around to learning nodes in Blender. They are great. I can’t believe I ever made anything without them.
The question:
The material nodes seem to be able to assign a color and alpha value only. That value goes on to be shaded by the lights for the final image. I came from a Renderman background where the programmable shader determined the color and the brightness based on the lights and whatever else you see fit. I don’t see a way to do that with Blender nodes. Am I just overlooking something, or does this functionality not exist? If it doesn’t exist, are there plans for such a thing?
I imagine there would be nodes for lights and shaders. The light nodes could take inputs such as direction and distance and return an intensity/color. The shader nodes would have inputs very similar to the current material nodes with the addition of the light location/direction and color/intensity. The nodes would then return the final shaded pixel values. Actually, the total functionality I’m thinking of overlaps extensively with what the material nodes already do. The difference is the addition of a light loop to calculate shading rather than base color only.
The addition would be an enormous benefit. Any thoughts?