cloth based shading any tips?

Hi there,
I recently discovered the cloth shader in 4.11 and used it a lot but somehow in 4.12 the shading looks different now.
I am considering leaving this cloth shader and make my own. Also, tweaking the cloth shader makes the whole material very bright and very hard to control.

I found some tips using fresnel tutorials and so on, but was wondering of to date anyone has better solutions to create a cloth type shading based upon the default lit model.
Mostly…any ideas on how to get the light direction?
regards! Tom