the next couple of shader pages do start to explore a technical trick that i've never really employed even though i've definitely seen it somewhere before.

so after albedo and normals, the next standard output to mess with is emission. the author showed how unity's post-processing could give the emission some actual glow effect, which is something i've done in the past (i've even posted my experiments with it in this very streak), so it was easy to breeze through.

but then they also showed how you can create a custom emission texture map and color regions pure red, green, and blue. with this, you can basically isolate the color channels using a little math and recolor the red, green, and blue parts independently. i think i'll look over this a little more next time to make sure i understand what's going on, but this is definitely a useful trick to keep in my back pocket.