For Blender 4.x, you should be using Geometry Nodes to transfer normal attributes from a Mesh object to a geometry-node based fur system.
This addon is broken in weird ways. It may mess with motion blur. It may crash blender. It may lead to hard-to-debug issues if you enable this addon and forget about it.
This addon is not supported by me or by Ruaidri. Please do not contact either of us for support for this addon. This addon will not be maintained by either of us.
As seen on TV!
image courtesy of ruaidri @ furaffinity
encode-normals is a small blender addon that copies the normals of a particle emitter to the particle strands each frame, for use in stylized fur shaders.
Blender does not provide access to the underlying emitter normals in the same way it does for mesh color. To get around this, the encode-normals addon stores emitter normals in world space in a vertex color layer. When enabled, it will automatically update the vertex color layer each frame for rendering.
I'm releasing this addon for free, no strings attached. It's open source under GPL2, just like Blender.
But if you like it and you use it a lot, please consider buying me a coffee at my Ko-Fi account!
You do not need to credit me if you use this addon. But I'd love to see what you make! Feel free to send me a link so I can admire it.
This addon was heavily inspired by and partially based on Steve Miller's Mesh Tension Addon
Thanks to these contributors for their improvements and fixes:
- @Menithal (#4) Added critical stability fixes and cleaned up code for maintainability
Vertex colors are stored as RGB values from [0, 1]. Normals are stored as
[-1, 1]. The plugin will map store the normals as
(normal * 0.5) + Vector3(0.5, 0.5, 0.5).
To reverse this transformation, you need to multiply the values by 2
and then subtract 1.0 by using Vector Math nodes in the shader editor
- Download the extension .py file
- In Blender, go to Preferences -> Add-Ons
- Click Install and select the .py file
- Enable
Mesh > Encode Normalsvia the checkbox
- Enable the
Render -> Lock Rendercheckbox. This avoids crashes during viewport updates, but your viewport will not respond while rendering (ESC still works) - Click on a mesh that you want to enable this feature on
- Under Mesh properties, enable
Particles Normalsvia the checkbox. This will create the vc_normals vertex color group if it does not exist yet. - Set up the shader using the node group above to use your encoded normals instead of generated normals. Consider doing the same for the body shader (see Limitations)
- Click
Encode Normalsto manually encode normals for the current frame while doing viewport work. - The addon will automatically encode normals every frame for you during render. Use the
Render Animation with Encoded Normalsmenu in the UI for consistent results. - Click the
Ru Button, which literally does nothing but looks cool
- Ru Button (does nothing)
The conversion process is not perfect; the normals are stored per-vertex and are interpolated between them, just like vertex colors. It's "close enough" for body fur, but if you really want to make sure everything matches, you should use the encoded normals on both the body and the fur shaders.
The addon does not currently update per frame within the viewport, to avoid slowing down the viewport for animation work. A button is available to manually update the vertex color layer.
This script will not instantly make your fur look like a top-tier furry 3d artist's work! This script only does the normal transfer. You'll still need to design a nice fur shader and base texture, make a good character model, light the scene well, etc etc.
- The plugin will throw an error if you click Encode Normals before clicking the checkbox. I forgot to make the addon disable itself until the checkbox is clicked. Lol.