How to get flat normals on a cube

Question

I am using OpenGL without the deprecated features and my light calculation is done on fragment shader. So, I am doing smooth shading.

My problem, is that when I am drawing a cube, I need flat normals. By flat normals I mean that every fragment generated in a face has the same normal.

My solution to this so far is to generate different vertices for each face. So, instead of having 8 vertices, now I have 24(6*4) vertices.

But this seems wrong to me, replicating the vertexes. Is there a better way to get flat normals?

Update: I am using OpenGL version 3.3.0, I do not have support for OpenGL 4 yet.

Answer 1

If you do the lighting in camera-space, you can use dFdx/dFdy to calculate the normal of the face from the camera-space position of the vertex.

So the fragment shader would look a little like this.

varying vec3 v_PositionCS; // Position of the vertex in camera/eye-space (passed in from the vertex shader)

    void main()
    { 
      // Calculate the face normal in camera space
      vec3 normalCs = normalize(cross(dFdx(v_PositionCS), dFdy(v_PositionCS)));

      // Perform lighting 
      ...
      ...
    }

Answer 2

Since a geometry shader can "see" all three vertices of a triangle at once, you can use a geometry shader to calculate the normals and send them to your fragment shader. This way, you don't have to duplicate vertices.

// Geometry Shader

#version 330 

layout(triangles) in;
layout(triangle_strip, max_vertices = 3) out;

out vec3 gNormal;

// You will need to pass your untransformed positions in from the vertex shader
in vec3 vPosition[];

uniform mat3 normalMatrix;

void main()
{
    vec3 side2 = vPosition[2] - vPosition[0];
    vec3 side0 = vPosition[1] - vPosition[0];
    vec3 facetNormal = normalize(normalMatrix * cross(side0, side2));

    gNormal = facetNormal;
    gl_Position = gl_in[0].gl_Position;
    EmitVertex();

    gNormal = facetNormal;
    gl_Position = gl_in[1].gl_Position;
    EmitVertex();

    gNormal = facetNormal;
    gl_Position = gl_in[2].gl_Position;
    EmitVertex();

    EndPrimitive();
}

Answer 3

Another option would be to pass MV-matrix and the unrotated AxisAligned coordinate to the fragment shader:

 attribute aCoord;
 varying vCoord;
 void main() {
    vCoord = aCoord;
    glPosition = aCoord * MVP;
 }

At Fragment shader one can then identify the normal by calculating the dominating axis of vCoord, setting that to 1.0 (or -1.0) and the other coordinates to zero -- that is the normal, which has to be rotated by the MV -matrix.