I'm testing creating the ray-casting normal using the closest vert weights.  This can give slightly better results in many areas, in my uphill test, at lower number of influence settings.  As the number of influences is increased, however, the current process begins to return better results.

That's all I've got, today.  Not a very productive day.  :lol:

I can't think of much else that could be tried, with the hybrid process.  So far it's passing every test and coming out ahead of anything else I try.  :thumbupboth:

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.