Smart Normal Fixer

Blender’s native Weighted Normal modifier is great, but it lacks the iterative smoothing controls that 3ds Max features out of the box. This addon bridges that exact gap, bringing a proper neighbor-averaging blur pass directly into Blender’s native workflow.

The addon intelligently blurs the normals to fix artifacts. You can either focus on small-area artifacts or blur the mesh globally. Furthermore, its key features are:

1) smart masking which will attempt to detect local small area artifacts

A "pinch" or artifact caused by bad topology has a very specific mathematical signature: high normal divergence. The script only applies the neighbor-smoothing pass to the vertices flagged by the precalculated mask.

2) fast Iterative blur using cached data (using pre-cached neighbor dictionaries)

3) unweighted average of neighboring vertex normals (laptacian smooth), i.e.
it constructs its initial normals using optional face area weighting (supporting standard or inverted weights for uneven polygon layouts), followed by laplacian neighbor-averaging passes to smooth out shading gradients.

4) calculating the neighbor averages directly and writing them straight into Blender’s custom split normal data without geometry nodes.

The addon has two button toggles and five sliders:

Buttons:

1. face area weighting - larger polygons exert more weight on initial normals.
2. invert area weights - inverts the area weights, causing smaller faces to have higher influence. (Compensates for uneven face sizes. Good for areas like curved surfaces that need to stay clean but couldn't have evenly spaced quad topology. ).

Sliders:

1. global blur iterations: smoothing passes applied across the entire mesh.
2. global smoothing strength: How much global blur to mix across the entire rock.
3. pinch blur iterations: extra smoothing passes applied specifically inside detected shading pockets.
4. pinch sensitivity: 0.0 = no pocket detection. 1.0 = maximum aggression, catches all shading pinches.
5. pinch correction strength: power of the local pocket eraser inside isolated shading bugs.

The addon will not work when there is an active weighted normal modifier, you need to collapse it, then use smart normal