I’ve been working along to this tutorial, adding in some own ideas.
One of the being that I base my particle object’s rotation on the particle/hair normal rather than the objects property.
It looks quite good, but in the render I noticed some of the pillars seem to be doing a “Leaning tower of Pisa”.
I can’t figure out why, the normals seem to be correct. Would anyone mind taking a look?
Blend: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/42915
As far as I can tell, it’s a trick of perspective. The instance isn’t off-angle from the normal, it’s around the back of the sphere and thus the normal points away from you. Due to it being an unusually tall instance, you can’t see the other blocks around it (they’re “over the horizon” so to speak) thus it’s just sticking up on its own. Without the context of the nearby blocks, it appears to be leaning along the plane parallel to the eye rather than leaning away from it (as it really is).
Ha, definitely a very interesting point. (Un?)fortunately, it wasn’t the real problem.
Looked at it again this morning with a fresh mind and noticed none of the hexagons appeared to be perfectly centered around each vertex. Then I played around a bit and found this in the hexagons used as object:
