What I am trying to do is this:
I have an approximate sphere, with hills and valleys on the surface. So the distance of each vertex from the center of the sphere differs a bit.
I have a color ramp/gradient texture
I want the color at each point on the sphere to use the distance of the vertex from the center to index into that gradient texture. So for instance if the gradient texture was green at lower indices and white at higher indices you would get green plains and white mountain tops.
I just want to know if this is something that a custom shader can even do. If so, I’ll start digging in and figure out how, though if there are similar examples I’d be happy to see them too.