transfer surface to metaball surface

[kiki]

Hi there folks,

Still very green with Houdini. In the shot I'm working on, a character is driving a particle fluid surface (scatterd points on the character's mesh), calculating as metaballs. That part works great; however, we've been trying to find a better way to transfer color / surface information onto the metaballs so that projections don't have to be done frame-by-frame.

I had an idea to do an attributeTransfer on vertices for UVs, which works for the most part. Where UV islands end, there are these blocks of distortion due to some points ending up on one island, and some points ending up on another, stretching out the UV faces. Subdividing the hell out of the target mesh helps with this, making the error almost invisible, but what I'd like to do is one of the following:

- Somehow generate a map from the erroring UV areas. If I could get the face area of a UV face, or the edge lengths of UV edges, I could color those parts of the mesh and output a map for compositing to clone out.

- Somehow push UV attributes to the primitive level, do the transfer between primitives, then push those UV attributes back down. (Really unsure how to do that as I haven't given it a try yet.)

or:

Am I doing this naively? Is there a better way?

Thanks in advance!