Flat Shaded Low Poly Style

The style works best when geometry is intentionally sparse. Small props usually sit at 100 to 800 triangles, characters at 2,000 to 6,000, and hero vehicles or creatures at 4,000 to 12,000 depending on animation needs. The goal is not the lowest possible number; it is the clearest silhouette with enough large planes for the light to describe the form.

The technical rule is normals. Flat shading requires split or hard normals per face, while smooth shading averages normals across adjacent faces and erases the faceted look. In Blender, use Shade Flat or mark sharp edges and Auto Smooth deliberately; in glTF/GLB export, keep custom normals so the receiving engine does not recompute them into a soft look. This makes the page distinct from gradient style, which can still use flat faces but focuses on color ramps.

Materials should be boring on purpose: high roughness, limited specular, one shared atlas or pure material colors. A 512px atlas is enough for most props, while 1024px handles a character or vehicle kit. Avoid normal maps unless the page goal is high-poly-to-low-poly baking, because normal maps can visually contradict the intentionally planar surface and make a flat-shaded asset look confused.

Export GLB for web, Godot and AR, or FBX for Unity and Unreal when you need pivots, skeletons and hierarchy preserved. Generated flat-shaded low poly assets are yours to use commercially with no attribution required, including games, education apps, prototypes and paid packs. Keep one lighting direction and one normal policy across a set so the assets look authored together.