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Author Topic: Align to surface  (Read 685 times)

RealViz

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Align to surface
« on: December 20, 2021, 04:19:03 PM »
I try to create animated cars so that they are always correctly aligned on the surface. Unfortunately it seems that RC aligns everything on polygon and not on his normal. Is that right?
more on YT + att
https://youtu.be/dJ6LLpGdMdg
Thanks

Paul Roberts

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Re: Align to surface
« Reply #1 on: December 20, 2021, 04:48:34 PM »
Hi, we do use the surface normal, but as far as I know the seamless effect caused by the smoothing groups is a result of the shader and not the surface normal direction. You might be better off projecting the spline onto the geometry, perhaps using the Glue utility, and setting the verts to smooth. A spline + surface combo in RailClone might also give you smoother results.

Thanks,
Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

RealViz

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Re: Align to surface
« Reply #2 on: December 20, 2021, 04:54:43 PM »
Yes, I wanted to avoid that. Probably the best combination is tyConform (tyFlow). And for the rest, we'll settle for a little "tug" on the edges. There won't be too many. Thx.

RealViz

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Re: Align to surface
« Reply #3 on: December 20, 2021, 05:11:38 PM »
Zkusil jsem trošku experimentovat s normálama a bohužel RC to vůbec nerespektuje :-(
https://youtu.be/d6Xyj0RsM8o
Edit:
sorry czech language.. :-(
I tried to experiment a bit with normals but unfortunately RC doesn't respect it at all :-(
« Last Edit: December 20, 2021, 08:43:04 PM by RealViz »

Paul Roberts

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Re: Align to surface
« Reply #4 on: December 21, 2021, 09:16:31 AM »

Thanks for the video. Apologies for not being clear, I should clarify. We use the face normal which is always perpendicular to the face. This isn't the same as vertex normals which can be any angle. The face normal is used to determine which way the face is pointing, vertex normals are used to affect shaders.

Thanks,
Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

RealViz

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Re: Align to surface
« Reply #5 on: December 21, 2021, 10:26:00 AM »
Ok thanks. This is exactly as I thought and wrote (maybe also not exactly described) in my first post. Thanks for the confirmation/clarification.