Lightmapped Terrain not providing normals to PostProcessing Shader.

Questions & Answers
1

I'm currently running a edited version of the DepthNormal encoding PostProcessing shader, and when trying to use it with a terrain using lightmapped based lighting, it creates this log message every frame:

Shader wants normals, but the mesh doesn't have them UnityEngine.Camera:RenderWithShader(Shader, String) UnityEngine.Camera:RenderWithShader(Shader, String) DepthBugTesting:OnPreRender() (at Assets\Skunkwerks Assets\Shaders\DepthBugTesting.cs:51) UnityEditor.EditorGUIUtility:RenderGameViewCameras(Rect, Rect, Boolean, Boolean) UnityEditor.EditorGUIUtility:RenderGameViewCameras(Rect, Rect, Boolean, Boolean) UnityEditor.GameView:OnGUI() System.Reflection.MonoMethod:InternalInvoke(Object, Object[]) System.Reflection.MonoMethod:InternalInvoke(Object, Object[]) System.Reflection.MonoMethod:Invoke(Object, BindingFlags, Binder, Object[], CultureInfo) System.Reflection.MethodBase:Invoke(Object, Object[]) UnityEditor.HostView:Invoke(String) UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

[....\Runtime\Filters\Mesh\LodMesh.cpp line 1061]

I've also tried setting up the shader with the default builtin shader provided on the Unity site (the one I originally edited from) and it also produces this error, however when setting up the camera with the new "Camera.depthTextureMode" settings, which uses this shader internally, it doesn't cause this error.

Can anyone shed some light on why this might be happening, or any way of getting around this error, as we need to use an edited version of the DepthNormals encoding Post Processing shader.

3

Like Jonas said, lightmapped terrain does not build normals in the mesh for efficiency reasons (it does not need them at runtime). The only exception is, when Camera.depthTextureMode is Depth+Normals, in that case it builds the normals because they are needed.

Currently there's no way to manually force terrain to always provide normals. Can you explain your use case? (e.g. maybe Camera.depthTextureMode would just work for you?)

2

As the terrain gets it's lighting information from the lightmap, it does not need any normals, so the engine skips calculating those in lightmapped mode. Can you switch to vertex or realtime lighting modes?