How to edit normals so light is even all the way around for grass patches?

Question

I've been trying to do this with the edit normal modifier, but I can't get it how I want, and that is because I don't full understand how to use that modifier. Maybe there is a better / simpler way than what I am doing?

I am making grass in Blender that will be used in Unity. I have a mesh with the grass texture on it. I make a grass patch out of these meshes, then export to Unity.

Here is an example of a patch of grass (it's not very good, but am not after realistic looking grass, it's more of a learning exercise).

Here is what it looks like when in Unity (note: I import the normals). The shader the patches are using is the Standard shader with culling off.

So patches are placed down with a random rotation, but you can see that some faces of the patch don't receive the light evenly. I assume this is due to the normals.

Here is another image where I try to edit the normals in Blender. You can see it has slightly better lighting. I don't full get what I am doing with the modifier, but I tried different things (box seems to work the best so far).

The modifier.

I basically want all faces to receive equal lighting.

Answer 1

For this case you need to select "Directional" and "Parallel Normals". The vector from your object origin to the target object origin is set as the normal for each of the vertices.

For grass usage case I would recommend trying a normal that points straight up as this is unaffected by rotation around Blender Z / Unity Y axis. But please note that this will make the faces' shaded color identical so the only difference in color will come from albedo / diffuse texture.