I have a bunch of instances rotated to lie flush with a mesh, but all pointing in the same general direction.
However, I want them to also point in a direction. I’m not sure how to describe it other than to try and get them to point towards one end of the cylindrical mesh. How should I go about doing this?
An example of what you’re trying to do would be very helpful
If you are using curves, you can sample the tangent and align your instances along those (need to resample the curve first):
For general meshes, you could use UV maps to generate tangents, you should be able to find something here:
If you’re generating the mesh in GN from a curve then this is super easy - you just Capture and align with the Curve Tangent (See answer above).
If you’re using something created by the Curve Bevels then you can generate edge paths from the UVs and use those tangents (you’ll need to capture the Normals in that case):
Good luck
I think I might’ve messed up a little too much of the nodes while trying to create a curve based on the mesh, because the only instances being affected are instances generated on the curve.
I’d like to use those nodes LordoftheFleas put in their post to create the curves out of the mesh, but I’m using 3.5. So I created a curve based off of the node in this post. Why are only the instances on the curve affected, and how could I extend the effect to all instances of this section of the mesh?
I am not sure it will work this way… Getting tangent vectors from a mesh by computing shortest paths seems a bit fragile to me ( meaning the resulting curves could go in a direction perpendicular to what you want sometimes. This already assumes that your mesh has the right topology, i.e. edges in the direction you are interested in). I think using a UV map would suit you better, except if you generate your mesh in geometry nodes from curves.
I guess I can deal with any inconsistencies with lining later on. I’m more worried about the fact that nothing is happening. How can I get the instances to actually rotate?
The points from the highlighted path will not have the tangent attribute stored, maybe this is the source of the issue?
That wire distributes the points where I actually want them to go. I just joined it with the Capture Attribute node because the Capture Attribute node doesn’t work without a geometry output. I did change it now to where I’m using a Store Named Attribute node to cut it out of the joining requirement, but to no avail.
I’m beginning to think that the curve isn’t actually doing anything. Muting the Align Euler to Vector node does nothing, nor does changing any of that node’s properties. Could the problem be there?
If that doesn’t matter, this frame is where the wire is coming from. Disconnecting the wire just made all the instances, except for the ones on the curve, disappear. Doing it with the updated one makes all instances disappear. Is there something within this frame that interferes with curves?
very difficult to say, honestly.
Could you share your setup?
Final Mesh Copy_3.5.0_v02.blend (4.7 MB)
I think the problem was that you tried to read an attribute that was not on the geometry you were trying to manipulate:
In my version, I convert the curve to points and then use a sample node to look for the nearest point on the other geo.
