Normal Map Relighter (Advanced)

The plain Normal Map Relighter gives you a directional light and a light mask. Advanced is what you grab when "a light" isn't enough - you want a colored key light, a proper specular highlight with a shininess knob, and the diffuse and specular passes separated so you can comp them yourself. Same family, same normal-map dot-product core, more control.

This is the node you reach for when you're shading something that needs to look lit rather than just be brighter: a polished surface with a visible highlight, a material preview where you can tell a matte surface from a glossy one, or a "hero" render of an albedo+normal pair before you commit to a full PBR pipeline.

How it works

Like its simpler sibling, it decodes the normal map into vector space, handles the OpenGL/DirectX green-channel flip, and shades with the dot product between normals and your light_x/y/z direction. On top of that it adds two things:

• Diffuse with a light color. light_color_r/g/b tint the diffuse shading, so you can set a warm key light and get a warm-side/cool-side split instead of gray-on-gray.
• Blinn-style specular. specular_intensity controls how strong the highlight is and specular_power (1-128, default 32) controls how tight - low values give a broad, soft sheen; high values give a tight, mirror-like glint.

Because the specular is driven by the same light direction, the highlight lands where it should: on surfaces angled toward the light. That's the detail that makes a normal map "pop" in a still image.

Inputs and outputs that matter

The setup inputs are image, normal_map, and light_x/y/z (start at (0,0,1) and nudge X/Y). Then:

• diffuse_intensity (0-10) - brightness of the shaded albedo.
• specular_intensity (0-10) - strength of the highlight; 0 turns it off entirely for a pure matte look.
• specular_power - shininess. Low = plastic sheen, high = metal glint.
• ambient_light (0-1) - the brightness floor in shadow.
• normal_format - OpenGL vs DirectX; wrong choice = inverted-looking shading.

Three outputs come out, and they're the real reason to pick this over the basic node: relit_image (combined), diffuse_lighting (the shaded pass on its own), and specular_lighting (just the highlight pass). Having them separate means you can multiply diffuse into your albedo, keep specular as an additive pass, and adjust either without re-running. It's the beginnings of an AOV-style workflow.

Installing it

Ships in TextureAlchemy. ComfyUI Manager (search "TextureAlchemy"), or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/amtarr/ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy

Restart and look under Texture Alchemist → Lighting. No models, no pip installs - it's all tensor math.

Where it falls short

Don't mistake "Advanced" for physically based. There's no environment, no roughness map, no Fresnel tied to real IBL - the specular is a stylized Blinn approximation. If you're lighting something metal and expect environment reflections to slide across it, this isn't the node; that's the IBL relighter's job. Use Advanced when you want a hand-tuned, art-directed key light with a highlight you can dial in.