This is a sphere of 128 rings x 128 segments. All edges are marked as sharp. In theory, all faces should be a solid color. But, above a certain line of latitude, everything seems to get broken, and the faces lose their definition. What’s up? I realize that values will be less distinct in the upper region, but I don’t understand why such a hard transition occurs. Also, why are there very, very faint stripes in that region? (The value only spikes by a bit or so, but the repeating pattern seems to emphasize it.)
andeeee pinged me about this thread so I thought I’d try and reproduce it… speculation to follow 
I did the same test with Maya and Unity with a 128x128 sphere and got the same results as you in Unity. At the poles it seems like the angle of incidence with relation to the lighting visually smooths out the facets.
I got better results in Maya (could still discern the facets all the way up) so I have to guess it’s some sort of optimization in Unity? Sorry not much help I guess :roll:
Thanks, Ethan. I’m not overly concerned about it; it’s a totally stupid mesh, to be sure. I was just using it to illustrate diffuse lighting concepts in a ShaderLab tutorial I made. The basic idea was, “using hard edges on smooth surfaces yields poor results”. So the weirdness adds to that effect, I guess. 
I just don’t understand why it looks like it does, and I’m a bit intrigued by the optical effects here. I’ve talked to a few people, and all of our eyes/brains seem to be emphasizing miniscule detail to form patterns and shapes that I wouldn’t expect to be apparent.
You mentioned the edges were marked as Sharp…is this the same thing as not smoothing the normals, when importing meshes into Unity?
It should be the same thing as using a Smoothing Angle of zero with the Calculate Normals box checked, but actually, Unity doesn’t do as good of a job as Blender with a mesh like this (see below). Personally, I find that section of the importer to be useless clutter anyway. That’s what a modeling app is for.
