average normal at a vertex and winding vector?

[originalfamousjohnsmith]

I want to be able to find the average normal at a vertex on meshlike data (I don't have winding/render order to work with and can't easily get it).

I have the basic idea, but the problem is that I can't seem to figure out what order to calculate the normals to get the right results.

If you think of the area around a vertex as a pyramid, if you take the normal of two base points across from each other then the perpendicular will shoot off in some random direction. If you take the normals in clockwise fashion for some and cc fashion for others, some will point into the sky and others will point into the ground (inside the point cloud).

EDIT: nm, figured it out