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Stylized Shading

Nature Shaders can be used for more than realistic rendering, it also supports powerful options for stylized shading.

Lighting and Normals

The first thing you'll want to do when working in a stylized art style is to adjust the lighting and normal settings in the material. By default, new materials will use double-sided rendering with different normals for the front- and back-side of the material.

nature-shaders-stylized-shading-lighting-example.jpg

Image: Example of double-sided lighting (left) and flat lighting (right).

To get "flat" lighting instead, you can set the following material property values:

nature-shaders-stylized-shading-surface-settings.jpg

Lighting Quality
"Low"
Reduces the lighting quality to disable unnecessary effects. This is optional but usually works well. For some games you may want to keep this at "High".
Vertex Normal Strength
"0"
Adjusts the vertex normals so that they always point up. This gives consistent lighting across the entire object.
(Double-Sided) Normals
"Same"
Ensures that both sides of the material use the same normals and receive the same lighting.

Translucency

For a more colorful translucency effect you can set the Blend Mode to "Overlay".

nature-shaders-stylized-shading-translucency-blend-mode.jpg

Image: Default "Add" blend mode (left) and "Overlay" blend mode (right).

Specular Highlights

Specular highlights can be disabled for the material to remove the shiny effect that shows when the sun is at lower angles. It is usually best to also set the lighting quality to "Low" at the same time to remove the fresnel effect that is added by the Physically Based Shading.

nature-shaders-stylized-shading-specular-highlights.jpg

Image: Specular Highlights enabled (left) and disabled (right).

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