ideas for calculating surface coordinates?

By Kolgrima · 2007-07-18

Description

I’m basically attempting to write my own scatter script since there appears to be no access to the native max scatter tool through script. Unfortunately I’m a bit green when it comes to max script, and I am unsure of how to calculate coordinates so that “node A” is placed somewhere on the surface of “node B” I’ve seen a simple example where copies are placed at vertex locations, but even when you introduce some randomness to the locations this technique produces poor results on objects with a low vertex count. If anyone has any ideas, or can point me to some useful syntax for calculating surface coordinates, I would greatly appreciate the help.

Cheers

Comments (3)

Martin Breidt · 2007-07-19

Have you considered using texture coordinates? If your object that you want to scatter onto has unique, non-overlapping texture coordinates, that should work.

Other than that, you could pick random faces and on a face, you could pick random barycentric coordinates (like the Attach Controller, but random). For uniform distribution, you probably have to take the face area into account in your random pick of a face?

-- MartinB

Kolgrima · 2007-07-19

Thanks for the input, great ideas; the target geometry I’m using has no texture data at this stage of the script, so using barycentric coordinates of a face would work well. Uniform distribution is of less concern, but just off the top of my head, I suppose I could use something like the average area divided by the face area giving me a result for the chance of face selection, A(a)/F(a) = C. I’ll play around with some more ideas for surface area.

Cheers

hi I'm not shure if i did

schaf82 · 2007-08-13

hi I'm not shure if i did totaly understand but you can get possitions on surfaces with intersecting the surface with a ray.

maeh maeh