Vertex shader breaking the mesh apart

Hi all,

Just having a little play with vertex offset in a shader.
Is there any way to keep the mesh from breaking up like this?


Here's my graph in shader forge. It's pretty straight forward but there don't appear to be many settings in shader forge, or mesh import that seem to have a big effect.


Thanks,
Pete

 

Hard edges. Unify your normals.

 

Hey thanks man!
Did a couple of quick tests with different imported normals -


Do you know if there is any way to change a meshes normals at runtime?
I'm trying to use this shader for an effect that wont work with the object's imported normals.

I was thinking of using it for an effect like this -

So I was thinking of copying the mesh at runtime and applying this shader.


Thanks!
Pete

 

You can change the normals at runtime, but it can be a relatively expensive operation. You have to manually iterate over all of the vertices in the mesh and find the ones with the same position, then average the normals and reapply. You're much better off making duplicate mesh assets with different import settings, or doing what some of the toon shader assets do and bake the averaged normal into the tangent or a free UV channel. The benefit of using the mesh tangent is it works on skinned meshes, but you can't use normal maps as easily.

 

Hey thanks!
So you bake into the spare UV channel (or tangent) then write that data to the mesh normals at runtime rather than having to calculate them at runtime?
If so that sounds okay, I have easy access to that channel data from Houdini, and I'm not using normal maps.

 

No, just change the shader to use the appropriate data on the mesh to do the push rather than the normal. Don't bother doing anything to the mesh from script. That's just wasting memory and CPU time.

 

Ahh awesome thanks!