  We investigate a variant of hypercubic gauge link smearing where the SU(3)
projection is replaced with a normalization to the corresponding unitary group.
This smearing is differentiable and thus suitable for use in dynamical fermion
simulations using molecular dynamics type algorithms. We show that this
smearing is as efficient as projected hypercubic smearing in removing
ultraviolet noise from the gauge fields. We test the normalized hypercubic
smearing in dynamical improved (clover) Wilson and valence overlap simulations.
