Creating "exploding" normals - better way to do it?

[chiess]

Hi,

I've quickly created a simple setup, which adds normals on points - pointing away from a specific point.

To be honest, I don't really like the way my setup works, because I am translating the area to the worldspace center, create the "exploading" normals (Pointposition -> Point normals), and then reposition the points back into their original position.

It gives me the desired result, but I would prefer to solve this via vopsops (or any other faster method). The big disadvantage with this method I have right now is, that it only works from one specific position of the pointcloud. Since I am centering the points, it doesn't work if I want to have multiple "exploding" pointnormals within the same pointcloud.

I thought of creating a foreach for each point and setting its normals to a specific direction, but that is overkill I suppose and doesn't sound very ... smart

Any advice would be great!

Thanks,

Chris

normalsDirection_01.hip

[magneto]

Hi,

You don't have to do any of that. Just create an AttribWrangle SOP and add a vector3 parameter called origin, and use this:

@N = normalize(@P - chv("origin"));[/CODE]

Also you don't need to use nodes to calculate the average of point positions. You can use the pointavg expression that refers to your delete node.

Or you could use the avg VEX function. But I believe pointavg will be faster.

[Guest mantragora]

Maybe something like this with multiple object support and custom weight for each object?

withWeighting.hip

[Guest mantragora]

PS. Also it blends between multiple objects.

PS2. I set some keys. Scrub the time line.

[Guest mantragora]

Or maybe you want to lag it a little too?

withLag.hip

[chiess]

Thanks magneto and mantragora!

@magneto: Unfortunately I am still using 12.1, no wrangle nodes . If you know a way how to do it without those nodes, please let me know.

@mantragora: Thanks, that looks really nice. I would have never thought about the buldge sop for that effect. I'll change it into vopsops (whatever is possible) and will post it here again, if anyone else wants to see it.

Thanks!

[magneto]

Yes you can still do it but you won't have the @ syntax. Just use a Parameter VOP inside a VOPSOP to do the same and use an Inline VOP. The syntax is different though. You will need to use $ to access parameters not ch.