How to get smoothed normals from meshes in shaders?

[sacred herald]

For that you need to average the vertex normals of any connected faces, but the shading would look completely different if you did that, so it might be better to bake that information into the vertex colors or something instead

[autumn jackal]

is there a callback for when a mesh updates so I can rebake the normals after the mesh gets updated?

also, how would i bake it into the vertex colors, there's no vertex colors attribute in the geometry