3DS Max - Single color per face

[YoyoBoy]

A client has asked for low-poly landscape elements that resemble the attached image. Notice that there is only one color per face. If the UV Unwrapper had the ability to scale multiple face islands to their local center, rather than as a whole, this would be super easy, barely an inconvenience. I could just break all edges, unwrap, and scale the faces to zero. But I'm kinda stumped.

[dlparisi]

Maybe just turning off smoothing would give you roughly the same look? The attached image looks like it might have some reflection too to give it some more variation.

If that's not enough variation maybe use an edit mesh modifier and explode all of the polys to elements. Then add a materialbyelement modifier and set it to a pretty high number (say 25) to randomize the ids. Then add a https://cg-source.com/MultiTexture multiplied over your regular texture in a composite map. Set the multi texture to a mid grey color and the random gamma to whatever works for you.

I know neither of these are exactly what you're after, just ideas that might work for you that I use quite often.

[YoyoBoy]

Smoothing turned off is also what is happening in that example, but to duplicate it exactly requires having one color per face. And I want to be able to paint onto the object (with Substance or something else) and retain that.

I can also imagine being able to do what I want in the VertexPaint modifier -if only it had a face-paint mode. Or if there's a way to normalize vertex painting to the face level, (perhaps with the Data Channel modifier?) that could work too.

[dlparisi]

Still not exactly what you're after but maybe something could work with a VrayToonMtl?

[YoyoBoy]

Nah, it needs to be for a real-time Unity environment. Oh wait... I think I have an idea.....

[YoyoBoy]

Turns out Vertex Paint can do what I need. I just paint what I basically want to see then, because I made each face its own element, the color of each face averages out when I hit the blur button. Happiness ensues.

[dlparisi]

Awesome.