Mr. Abhishek Sanghani 0 Report post Posted June 4, 2013 Hi All I'm new here. Could I get some help on obtaining the normal at a specific point of the surface, if I only know the x,y,z coordinates of that point? It seems easy to determine the normal if i know the UV of the point, but I'm unable to find a function that can return the UV value just based on the x.y,z coordinates. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mr. Claus Abt 14 Report post Posted June 5, 2013 Hi Abhishek,One option: create a projection point, e.g. at given x and y, project a point onto the surface. This projection point can give you the information about its U and V position on the surface. I have attached a small project that implements the normal as a line.If you need such a normal more often, it might be useful to encapsulate such a setup in a feature. CheersClaus normal.fdb Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mr. Abhishek Sanghani 0 Report post Posted June 5, 2013 Hi ClausThanks for your help. I figured out a similar way to sort out the problem. In my case the point lied on the surface, so I used it as a source and took [0,0,0] as the direction. That gave me a a point at the same location as the source. I would really appreciate it, if you could let me know- when using the normal to a surface at a point, which direction is used conventionally? Could the normal be flipped for a surface (to point inwards or outwards). Best Regards Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mr. Claus Abt 14 Report post Posted June 5, 2013 I am expecting that our software returns the mathematical defined normal computed from dU/dt x dV/dt (right hand, thump U direction, index V direction and middle the positive normal direction). If you want to switch to the inside you can substract the normal. e.g.: line normal(onSurface, onSurface - surface.getNormal(onSurface,getU(),onSurface.getV())) CheersClaus Share this post Link to post Share on other sites