If I have a mesh of triangles, how does one go about calculating the normals at each given vertex?
I understand how to find the normal of a single triangle. If I have triangles sharing vertices, I can partially find the answer by finding each triangle’s respective normal, normalizing it, adding it to the total, and then normalizing the end result. However, this obviously does not take into account proper weighting of each normal (many tiny triangles can throw off the answer when linked with a large triangle, for example).
This blog post outlines three different methods and gives a visual example of why the standard and simple method (area weighted average of the normals of all the faces joining at the vertex) might sometimes give poor results.