Flat shading

Flat shading is the most basic and lightweight type of shading. By default, the ShadingTypesDemo.swf opens with FlatShadeMaterial selected. With flat shading, each triangle of an object will be shaded by using a color fill. The color is determined by the angle between a triangle's surface normal and the position of the light. As there's no interpolation between the colors used on a triangle and the triangle next to it, this will result in hard edges and a very blocked look and feel, which seems even stronger because of the 3D model that we use. The model has pairs of triangles, which share the same surface normal. This also gives the incorrect impression that flat shading is based on polygons instead of triangles.

Note

A surface normal is the perpendicular vector of a surface, which in this example is a triangle. The normal determines the orientation of a surface. The following image illustrates the surface normals of six triangle pairs that seem to form a polygon together:

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