Showing posts with label normals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label normals. Show all posts

Saturday 3 December 2016

Attribute Reorient & giving animated geo new normals for fur

Sometimes you want to reorient your normals on an object. However when you do it & it turns out that your object is animated, the new normals might not behave as expected. The normals are probably "swimming" and not following the verts/points as you'd expect.
This is because you generally want your animation done AFTER the modelling process and your new normals don't know anything about the transforms that have happened before. Simply timeshifting and attribute interpolating doesn't seem to work.

Fortunately there's a node called Attribute Reorient. It will reorient more than just normals, but so far this is the use I've had for it.

Oh - my problem was having a pre animated alembic. I wanted to alter the normals for fur direction purposes, but the pre-animation was making the normals & thus also the fur behaviour freak out. By using the Attribute Reorient to essentially force new normals onto the animated geo I sorted out my problem! WINNER.
*note* seems like it looks for the vectors in the points section..so make sure your stuff is there!

Wednesday 5 October 2016

using object's rotation as a vector value.

A simple method would be to set the world aligned object's vector value to pure X,Y or Z (eg <<1,0,0>> for all X)before it ever gets transformed. As long as inherit attributes is active, the vector will also be transformed/rotated etc)
Useful for setting vectors to point in the direction of the object.