Backlight is a Shader-based solution for creating edge lighting on objects / characters without the use of lights. This can be helpful for animated characters, removing the need to animate light sources following them, and set up light groups for having character specific edge lighting (like what can be seen in Spiderverse, for example).
Backlight is camera oriented, specific to the material you apply it to, and doesn't use a single light source, allowing you to just focus on the animation, knowing your edge lighting will always just work, exactly the way you set it up to :]

I put a lot of effort into making the controls nice and as user friendly as possible, while still keeping all functionality I felt was necessary. The Backlight direction is controlled with a nice Direction input, which is a sphere that you can rotate on the node to point the Backlight. Once you've positioned it, the Backlight is locked to the view angle, so wherever and however the character or camera moves or rotates, the backlight will stay nice and consistent! Oh and also, it works perfectly and identically in both EEVEE and Cycles!

UPDATES:

12/01/25

• Updated for better Cycles support.

Backlight looks much nicer on reflective and transparent materials when using the "Combine Backlight" node

• Added new "Reflect Backlight" toggle to Combine Backlight node

Used for enabling the old reflection functionality, allowing backlight to show in reflections in Cycles (Off by default)

License

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