Surface normals in Blender? I currently have a .ply mesh, and I am trying to compute the surface normals of the blob-like object. I wish to encode the normals in an RGB map, so I tried linking the geometry node's normal to the emission shader as shown below:



However, I checked the output for the rendered image (in MATLAB) and the normals were certainly not right. In the preview pane, the cube looked like this:



Clearly, something isn't right, as I would want the face facing the viewer to be green and not black. 

Does anyone have any input?
If your goal is to get a texture with those values then just bake the Normals but select World instead of Tangent in the menu.