in forward rendering you don’t need any scene normals, just tangent space and the light information. and you gotta know the local light limit per mesh. that should still be 4 dynamic lights (point or spot lamps) and 1 directional shadow cascade. like the mobile renderer. or did that change by now? are we at 8 forward lights yet? i dunno.
either way, to show world normals you’d have to compile or link a shader combo for every material in the scene that only samples the normal maps and writes that to the scene color for the visualizer.
@Arkiras if i look into source engine code they have baseline vertex shaders for the deformation and debug pixel shaders for this kinda visualizer stuff. it’s actually quite simple. just replace the pixel shader and link it. you gotta have proper coded pipelines between those 2 shader stages tho. the vs output gotta match the ps input. structured shaders.