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vertex_normal was a Mesh attribute, available in Blender 2.93's Geometry Nodes. It has since disappeared. The normal attribute is a face-normal, available in the Face domain.

It is often necessary to access the vertex-normal, for instance in a case like this:

enter image description here

.. where tiles are selected and rotated according to vertex normal.

At the moment, the only way I can find to get hold of vertex-mormals is to Point Instance sticky notes all over my mesh, and transfer their instance normals (which are not listed as available,) back into the mesh, as in v_normal_B, below:

enter image description here

Am I missing something? When the team removed vertex_normal, was it because there is a better way? Better still, is there a way of accessing custom normals?

Chris
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Robin Betts
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  • If anybody knows the development well enough to know the general plan of attack.. whether this kind of attribute is likely to reappear, so much the better. – Robin Betts Aug 18 '21 at 10:14

2 Answers2

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you can try to get it like this:

enter image description here

Chris
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    Aaaargh! I've been ploughing through the docs to figure out how on earth I could have deduced this from them. Did you watch the same video as me? Well, I did :D . And the language seemed so.. well.. non-mathy, and the 'String' seemed not necessary.. so, when I tried it and it didn't work, I gave up instead of re-checking. – Robin Betts Aug 18 '21 at 15:04
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    Yep, string is not necessary- might be I am watching tons of tutorials…. – Chris Aug 18 '21 at 15:06
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    But I am happy I could at least one time help you – Chris Aug 18 '21 at 15:07
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Since Blender 3.0. there's IInput > NNormal node:

It will give a vertex normal if evaluated for a point domain, like here: geometry nodes - even thickness boundary

Markus von Broady
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