[Closed] Align to a Quad?

i assume you converted your plane to an editable mesh and then use meshop.getFaceCenter on each face. If you convert it to poly and use polyop.getFaceCenter instead, you will get the result you desire

here is one fast and cheap method using polyOp

(
 	polyOb = convertToPoly (Torus_Knot radius:8 radius2:3)
 	teaP= (teapot radius:2)
 	
 	
 	for f = 1 to (polyop.getnumfaces  polyOb) do
 	(
 		n = polyop.getFaceNormal polyOb f
 		p = polyop.getFaceCenter polyOb f 
 		t = instance teaP 
 		t.transform = MatrixFromNormal n 
 		t.position = p
 	)
 	
 	
 )

he-he… learn the matrix algebra:

pretranslate (matrixfromnormal facenormal) facecenter

but it’s not absolutely correct. we were talking about this matter on this forum a lot. just do the search

vapourise, you saw my script jpAligner at scriptspot. it uh… has the .ms attached now. anyway it sounds like your looking for polyop.getFaceCenter like jonahhawk suggested.

Hey and thanks for the replies guys, I guess I got to the point where I couldnt see the wood for the trees. Must have been using a mesh instead of poly.

Thanks for the code Jonah I will try to learn from that:) Yeh Nudity I really like the sound of that script and will have a look at what you have been doing with it and also try to learn!

Denis, I was looking into the matrix stuff when I was getting stumped yesterday and it does look really handy but I still find it a tad overwhelming, will definately try to understand it better though as I progress!

Thanks again people

    fn scatterNodes ground brush = if iskindof ground Editable_Mesh and isvalidnode brush do
    (
    	faces = ground.faces as bitarray
    	done = #{} 
    	for f in faces where not done[f] collect
    	(
    		polys = meshop.getpolysusingface ground f
    		ground.selectedverts = meshop.getvertsusingface ground polys
    		done += polys
    
    		center = (averageSelVertCenter ground)*ground.objecttransform
    		normal = averageSelVertNormal ground
    		
    		copy brush pos:center dir:normal wirecolor:green
    	)
    )
    /*
    (
    	delete objects
    	brush = 
    	(
    		top = Cone smooth:on heightsegs:1 capsegs:1 sides:24 height:8 radius1:2 radius2:0 pos:[0,0,-20]
    		top.mat = standard diffuse:green
    		bot = Cylinder name:"tree" smooth:on heightsegs:1 capsegs:1 sides:24 height:2 radius:0.5 pos:[0,0,-22] wirecolor:green
    		bot.mat = standard diffuse:brown
    		attach (bot = converttomesh bot) top
    		bot
    	)
    
    	ground = mesh name:"ground" length:100 width:100 lengthsegs:10 widthsegs:10 wirecolor:yellow pos:[-50,-50,0]
    	addmodifier ground (Noisemodifier fractal:on strength:[25,25,25] seed:(random 0 1000000)) -- add a little fun
  	scatterNodes ground brush 
    )
    */
    

hehe, Denis…that code looks absolutely brilliant but I have no idea what it does, I feel bad that you took the time to compile it and I have no clue!

I tried out Jonah’s cheap and cheerful way and it works out alright but how do I go about making sure all the aligned objects orientation are the same, at the moment when the objects are aligned to the faces they all have a different rotation.

Cheers, guys

ha, yeh it works for sure I have the mini forest on my screen at the moment I do appreciate all your effort even if I dont always understand it.

I have included a picture of what my main problem is at the moment…

cheers, K

Yes, rotations are quite confusing to me too. I just spent a couple days messing with that stuff for new tool I just made. It aligns objects to verts/edges/faces with offsets and so on.

I wasn’t able to figure out how to get my rotations proper either. But for what I have it isn’t as vital all the time, but I’d also like to know how to align to a face Normal, then rotate based on that so Local Y is along the face Direction.

I guess you could get 2 points on an edge for a Direction Vector and use that, but it’s hard to say what points to get.