I Let Two Gradients Do All the Terrain Coloring for Me — Here's How It Works

Been working with Polaris for terrain in Unity and wanted to share one of its shading modes that I keep coming back to — Gradient Lookup. The idea is straightforward. Instead of building a splat map stack or painting texture layers by hand, two gradients drive the entire terrain color. How it works Color By Normal reads the surface slope. A face pointing straight up is flat ground — a face pointing sideways is a cliff. Map colors across that range and your terrain automatically separates cliffs from flat areas without any manual painting. Color By Height reads elevation. Bottom of the gradient is the lowest point of your terrain, top is the highest. Set your altitude zones — sand, grass, rock, snow — and every part of the terrain picks up the right color automatically. Blend By Height is a curve that controls which gradient wins at each elevation. Keep it low at the bottom and top so height color dominates — pure sand at the riverbed, pure snow at the peaks. Raise it in the mid-range s