This is my favorite component and the one I use the most as this tool here will 'surface' any heightmap you have. Yes, that wired texture you get out of a feedback loop ...the idea is to get a nice shading on that. To define a surface means you need a perfect normal map. The component here just took the second revision yesterday. I always thought this would be only a mediocre approximation but good enough when it comes to less precise situations like playing with noise in feedback. I was missing an - 0.5 offset for almost 2 years :)
I like to call this method 'stretching' as we only have a set of vectors with peaks of approx 0.5,0.5,1 after the normal top. Or we would like to get nice all-around distribution vectors for the normal map. I had to stretch! :) ...I did a tutorial about this on my Patreon back on May 16, 2020 *. If you want to get into more details or just support me with my research, come join me there, you'll get access to nearly 100 tutorials.
Please try out this little tool and tell me how you like it. I put it side by side with the 'cross product' method for normals and I believe is hard to get a smaller difference in TOPs.
Thank you massive.
* Normals in Touchdesigner (Patreon exclusive): https://www.patreon.com/posts/normals-in-37188914