Free roaming lsystem

[Hazoc]

I bet this one's tricky. Any ideas on the following:

I'm dreaming about a tool that could randomly grow a lsystem on a arbitrary model regardless of it's geometry type or topology or nothing by using a point cloud of the chosen model.

This would hapen by creating a point could from the source geometry by scatter operator and transfering normals to it using attribute transform. The point cloud acts as a domain for the lsystems branches. This would create a nice continuous space for branches to randomly grow along forever.

Now I would need to sample the point cloud in VEX for every branch (turtle) in their current location.

I would take few of the closest points at the current turtle position and calculate an average normal value of the points in the area.

This value should be converted to something that tells the lsystem in which direction to grow the subsequent branch. Possibly to a tangent plane or something.

So:

1) Is it possible to loop through a vop sop and do a point cloud sample while generating lsystem ? How to pass current turtle position from lsystem to VEX pointcloud functions ?

2) What would be the best mathematical way to construct a tangent plane form a value of a normal and then pass it to the lsystem as a direction for a branch ?

3) Any other approaches to achieve this ? Creep sop seems to be choosy with guide geometrys type and topology. Otherwise very nice.

Let me know if I wasn't clear enough.