Character is shiny

That’s good (although not 100% accurate, technically).

What’s still missing is the basics of shader programming. Many beginners don’t understand that textures are values and a sampler samples (basically) one pixel of the texture based on a position input (usually derived from the UV layout). Many just believe that the “texture is applied”, although I technically feed values from textures (“LUT”) into parameters of a shader (or the processing/rendering pipeline).

Beginners should have a basic understanding of that to understand that they can also just adjust these values (e.g. using lerp, multiply, power, …).