LogInSet to be released soon with Laplacian Smoothing, which ensures that triangle and topology spacing no longer affect shading.
In typical realistic asset workflows, a high-poly mesh is used to bake normals onto a low-poly version, preserving fine surface details. This method is widely supported by many tools and works well for realistic rendering. However, in anime and other stylized rendering, the goal is often to simplify and smooth the surface details instead. The challenge is that stylized workflows usually don't start with a high-poly version, which complicates the traditional approach.
Created by Fondant, this add-on offers a set of tools designed to help author Custom Vertex Normals for achieving clean toon and cel shading. While the primary focus is on improving normals for 3D anime characters, it can also be used for other applications.
These tools make it easy to author high-quality normals starting from a game-ready mesh. With enough vertex density, they can be used directly as custom vertex normals, or alternatively, the mesh can be subdivided and the normals baked into a normal map using standard workflows.
Custom Normals add-on is said to launch this week, and the first feature will be Laplacian Smoothing, designed to make shading independent of triangle layout and topology spacing. It includes an option to invert traditional face area weights, helping to balance shading across faces of varying sizes. In short, it gives you the smooth, clean shading of a perfect quad mesh, even if your actual mesh is far from ideal.
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