Customizing Normals – 8: Combining Normals with Surface Gradients

aVersionOfReality writes:

So far in this series we’ve explored how to work with Normals in Geometry Nodes, and how to transfer them between meshes. Now we will get into our options to stack, layer, or otherwise combine multiple Normals together into a new shape. In this video we’ll mostly talk about Surface Gradients as a prelude to Tangent Normal Mapping, which will come next.

Surface Gradients are a convenient way to add Normals together. You can’t combine Normals by literally just adding them due to how the math works, so we convert them to a Surface Gradient first. And we can do that in either Geometry Nodes or Shader Nodes as the math is the same! But there are some limitations that we’ll learn about.