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Bent Normals

Bent Normals Icon

Bent normals can improve how surfaces react to ambient lighting, especially in non-path-traced renderers such as game engines.

Usually bent normals are baked to a texture but this modifier will calculate bent normals directly on geometry. A cone of rays is cast from each point and the normals are sampled and averaged to find the average direction of ambient light.

  • bent off
    Bent normals off
    Unnaturally dark shadows.

  • bent on
    Bent normals on
    Fake bounce light added to shadow areas.

Options

  • Factor. How much bent normals are mixed in with existing normals.

Collision Geometry

Collide with other objects in the scene.

  • Object. Object to collide rays with.
  • Collection. Collection to collide rays with.

RayCast

Control the distribution of rays used to calculate the bent normals.

  • Ray Count. How many rays are cast.
  • Ray Length. How long to cast each ray.
  • Cone Angle. The angle of the cone that rays are distributed in using a Fibonacci distribution.