Gradients

Where the look lives. Five rows of one atlas.

Edit them

Open GA_FortCharacter, or Fort → Open GA_FortCharacter. Drag stops. It re-bakes as you go, so every material reading it updates live and none of them has to be recompiled.

Row	Read with	What it decides
`DiffuseFalloff`	remapped N·L	the highlight, the mid tone, the core shadow, and where the transitions sit
`SkinDiffuseFalloff`	the same	the redder ramp skin blends toward
`SkinUnderglow`	the underglow mask	the wax colour
`FresnelEnemy`	the rim mask	red rim
`FresnelAlly`	the rim mask	blue rim

Why a gradient

A dot product decides where your terminator falls and how hard it is. A gradient means an artist decides instead - three tones and two transitions, placed by dragging.

It is also what stands in for an ambient term. The ramp never reaches black at the dark end, so nothing on a character ever goes fully unlit, and there is no ambient light anywhere in the model to make that happen.

Keep the format HDR. The rim rows run past 1.0 on purpose, because a rim that can only reach white cannot separate a character from a white wall.

One per character

GA_FortCharacter is a default, not a fixture.

Fort → New Character Atlas… and pick where it goes.
Edit the copy.
On the character's instance, point Atlas at the copy's baked texture.

Atlas wants the baked texture - the sibling T_ asset - not the Gradient asset itself.

Keep the row order and you are done. Change it and set the five Row scalars to match: RowDiffuse, RowSkinDiffuse, RowUnderglow, RowRimEnemy, RowRimAlly. They are parameters rather than names resolved at compile time, so your atlas does not have to match an order it did not choose.

Row is a whole number. A fraction lands between two rows and the filter blends them.

Every gradient tap goes through the one Atlas parameter, so a character reading four rows spends one sampler on them, not four.

Starting points

Row	Aim for
Diffuse falloff	a dark plateau, a knee somewhere near the middle, a bright plateau. The knee position is the terminator; the knee width is how hard it reads
Skin falloff	the same shape, but the dark end goes red rather than blue-grey
Underglow	black, up into a deep red, back to black. It is an additive term, so the ends must be black
Rims	black for the first half or more, then up hard past 1.0. The flat black start is what keeps the rim on the silhouette instead of washing the body