OTOY Forums

Having trouble aligning cones on a cube so that their points are all oriented outwards with Scatter on Surface. Works in Stand Alone but unable to reproduce in Octane Blender.

Please refer to this thread for more info and screen shots:

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=77367&p=398897#p398897

Answered:
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=77367&p=398954#p398954

You need to set Normal Align to 1.

There must be some other setting I have wrong because it is still not working. See attached screenshot and blend file.

You have the Smooth Normal option on.
Also, you need to rotate the cone geometry (so in Item mode) by -90 degrees on the x axis.

Thanks ……… I finally got that set up to work. There seems to be a discrepancy between how Scatter on Surface works in Octane Blender and Stand Alone.

In Stand Alone checking or unchecking the “Smooth normal” option has absolutely no effect on the Cones’ orientation around the cube. Even more puzzling is that that in Stand Alone the cones all face outward around the cube without having to change the rotation value – it works keeping the vale at 0. But in Blender Octane it is necessary to change the rotation value to -90 as you instructed. I am wondering does this have to do with Blender’s internal coordinate system?

pegot wrote:Thanks ……… I finally got that set up to work. There seems to be a discrepancy between how Scatter on Surface works in Octane Blender and Stand Alone.

In Stand Alone checking or unchecking the “Smooth normal” option has absolutely no effect on the Cones’ orientation around the cube. Even more puzzling is that that in Stand Alone the cones all face outward around the cube without having to change the rotation value – it works keeping the vale at 0. But in Blender Octane it is necessary to change the rotation value to -90 as you instructed. I am wondering does this have to do with Blender’s internal coordinate system?

Blender handles polygon normals differently than Standalone. A "standard" Box in Blender is somehow different than a Standalone primitive Box.
Blender is using Y for depth and Z for height. Just the opposite of Standalone. That's why we need to rotate the geometry in Blender so it's "aligned" to the Y axis.