Okay, I’ve been struggling with this all night. What I need to happen is to create a bunch of point objects – one for each vertex of a mesh, that positioned to each vertex and is oriented along that vertex’s normal.
What I’ve got so far is this:
s = $
t = (Point Wirecolor: (color 192 0 0) axistripod:true)
for f = 1 to theMesh.numverts do
(
theClone = instance t wirecolor:(color 128 128 0)
theClone.pos = PolyOp.getvert TheMesh f
)
Thats with my really bad experimentations in averaging face normals for each vertex taken out. I get that one needs to take each vertex and find the “average” of the connecting faces’ normals. I cannot for the life of me, however, figure out how to “average” the point3’s it returns, nor do i know how to turn them into usable rotation data.
I would appreciate a helping hand.
EDIT: Wow, what an amateur mistake: Plural of Vertex = Vertices… I say it being 1:30am is a valid excuse.
i’m not sure how you do it with a poly object but with a mesh its really easy:
getNormal <object name> <vert number>
then assign the result to the .dir property of your points.
Jeez, I tried that last night and I couldn’t get it to work. Tried it today, works like a charm… I give up, lol.
That function will only work on mesh objects so I would initially wack a mesh select modifier on top of your object – just to be sure – and then remove it at the end of the script or once it is no longer required
BTW you can average face normals buy adding them together and normalizing the result. This little snippet will turn the slice plane of a poly object to point towards the average normal of the selected faces.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Align Slice plane to selected faces
-- version 1.0
-- max version 6, 7
-- written by Joshua Newman
-- written 21/02/04
-- last updated 04/07/05
-- copyright 2004
-- www.joshuanewman.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Align Slice plane to selected faces of an editable poly
obj=selection[1] -- the first object in the selection set
s=for i in obj.selectedfaces collect i.index -- collect the selected faces
n=[0,0,0]
for i in s do n+=polyop.getfacenormal obj i -- get the average facenormal
p=[0,0,0]
for i in s do p+=polyop.getfacecenter obj i -- get the average face position
p/=s.count
s=(obj.max-obj.min) -- get the basic object size
x=0
for i=1 to 3 do x+=s[i]
size=(x/3)/2
polyop.setsliceplane obj (ray p n) size -- set the slice plane
I hope it helps < :
josh.
and also, you can cerate your point using the dir parameter so you could replce the last line in that code with :
p=point pos:p dir:n
Remeber though, that works on EPoly not EMesh!
To make it work with Emesh use getFaceNormal instead of polyop.getFaceNormal
Josh.