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  • Published 20 Sep 2023

Make Normals Editable in Geometry Nodes

It would be great to be able to edit normals in Geometry Nodes. At the very least, there should be a way to achieve the functionality of the Normal Edit modifier.

For one thing, the Normal Edit modifier is a common technique for more seamlessly blending environment assets with the ground, but additionally, good looking cards for trees/bushes in professional games often use bent normals (see the following article from polycount on this: wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage )

In the image, look at the two middle rows for the difference between using bent normals and not.

589px-Tree_shading_examples.jpg

This bent normals method is currently possible with the Normal Edit modifier or just manually using the various normals tools in the Mesh > Normals menu, but it is not possible within Geometry Nodes, since the Normal attribute does not appear to be writable.

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Development Status: Done

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christsdude
20 Sep 2023

3 Comments

4
christsdude Author

Oh, fantastic! I wanted to see if this was already being discussed before I made a post about it, but I missed that task. Hope they successfully manage to bring it to 4.1!

1
madsergorc

I'm also very much looking forward to this feature.