I have a problem with normals on geometry deformed by Deform SOP. They seem to have a desire to stick towards their initial point of orientation (from the capture pose?). Normally this wouldn't be a problem to me as I currently rig and animate characters for Unity engine, and normals on skin-deformed objects are perfectly fine there. However, I now want to render out a few stills with Mantra and the shading goes completely crazy because of those nasty Ns. What can I do to fix it? My normals are vertex attributes. Marking the “deform normals” checkbox on a Deform SOP doesn't make any difference.

I'm attaching some screenshots.

The Bone Deform SOP doesn't support vertex normals, only point normals. So you can either promote them to point normals before the Bone Deform using an Attribute Promote, OR you can instead append a Normal SOP after it and tell it to recompute the normals (probably point).

Perfect. Promoting the attribute to points did the trick.
Thank you, Edward.

edward
The Bone Deform SOP doesn't support vertex normals, only point normals.

Just ran into this recently, reported as Bug #82070