Finding the normals of a vertex?

[dannyst]

I know that a given vertex can have multiple normals, but I don't have any way to get the normals of a vertex in mel. I can see the value in the component editor, but that is the only place I can find it. I can't figure out how to get that normal though.

Say in the component editor you have a vertex and it shows a normal.x normal.y normal.z as components in the editor. I had hoped that I could do it with float $normalx=pCube1.vtx[3].normal.x. But woe is me, I cannot do that. Anybody know how to get that value?

[deane]

Try

polyNormalPerVertex -q -xyz;

That should return the values of the selected verticies normal

[campbell]

polyNormalPerVertex -q -xyz ...
for all the vtx-face normals, if they are shared, just take first value.

hows that beveler you been working on going?
been thinking about how i might do it myself if you find you cant release yours. doing it in mel, as i dont have any api experience. bit of a tricky one! care to share some pointers on your approach?

[dannyst]

Thanks for the poiner on the vertex normal.

First thing I did was modified MJPolytools SplitAroundVertsEdgesFaces to have a distance attribute rather than percentage.

That gave you a pretty solid coplain though it is not perfect due to some shortcomings of MJPolytools

From there you can make the bevel if you are able to figure out what to delete etc.

I never did get the context stuff to work for this one all that well. So what I had to do was just have the coplain split as I called it save its start edges in a global variable. Then the bevel used that start selection to delete the appropriate edges. That created a face that Maya often couldn't figure out well. I had to learn the sets stuff so I could select the resulting face from the group of faces before the delete. Then I let Maya Triangulate and Cuadrangulate that face for cleanup. So it doesn't work perfectly because I don't want to write a smarter triangulate and quadrangulate method. Maya doesn't know how to handle some of the resulting faces as it should. It also fails where MJPolytools failed in a few things but it is functional for a large majority of the cases.

My boss wants to keep my tools in our studio so that is probably more than he would want me to share, but that should be a good start to your stuff.

[campbell]

yep yep, thats what i was doing/imagining. i do this manually as an alternative bevel already, as imagine others do. i made a post yesterday about doing just such a mod on cgtalk to see if anyone might be interested in doing it.

how did you pop distance in? did you just measure ea edge as the script trawls through them and stick this in the slide expression? dealing w the special splitting cases would be a bit of hassel, i can see that.

did you figure out how to move smoothly through your script(s) w user interactn?