Flatten is a very weird texture. It tells Imagine to shade every point on the object’s surface as if it were pointing in a certain direction. Every surface normal is rotated so that it faces the +Z direction of the texture axis. Weird? You bet! What this does is make the object become shaded as if it were perfectly flat, like a picture painted onto cardboard. This is kind of fun, since you can take an object and change it into more of a flat, cartoony appearance.

The really cool part is that the Fade control will let you halfway flatten the object. If you set it to 0.5, the surface normals will be rotated to half way between their true position and the flat direction indicated by the texture. If you morph this, you can flatten your objects over a period of time! You, too, can make an animation of Flat Freddie, the evil supervillan, compressing his body to the thickness of a newspaper. Another neat effect might be to morph what appears to be a flat painting of an object into a real object.