Flat Lit Terrain Shader

Unity Engine
1

Hi all,

I’m looking to have my terrain appear as flat lit polygons and not as smoothed polygons as is standard.

In other words, much like you can set a model properties on import to have calculated normals and calculated tangents with a smoothing angle of zero; I wish to have the terrain looking exactly the same.

I’ve played around with the different shaders available in the Free version of Unity, and I’ve scoured the internet for answers, but i cant seem to find a solution to this problem. I have literally zero experience with writing shaders, and my project is in pre-production. And so I’m doing a little art style research, flat shading being an area of great interest.

Thank you in advance,

Dan

2

I recently tweeted about some options, but they would all require some experience with writing shaders, some knowledge of the rendering pipeline, and research time.

The problem is that Unity doesn’t give us access to the mesh created by the terrain, so we can’t easily duplicate the vertices to create flat shading.

Geometry and Tessellation shaders create new vertices, so you might be able to create a work-around using that, but it would only work on Windows, with DX10/11 Hardware. Also, I haven’t tried it, and I haven’t seen anyone do it, so I don’t know if it would actually work.