Day 27

Today I continued working on the particles. I consulted jiabao on how to group the points without using a bounding box. He told me that I could just drag the points that I want to group and group them according to pattern, but it isn't that procedural. He also gave me some directions that I could work on, like grouping the points according to their normals. He asked me to post on the forums to get some lead on how it works.

Finally, I received a reply from some one on sidefx forum. He did a demonstration on how to group them using dot-product.

Below is how it looks:

And this is how it looks inside the VOP SOP:

 I then tried applying it to my terrain. I got it to work somehow. But the problem is, it wasn't easy to control at all. Firstly there are other points which I do not want but they have the same normal direction as the points I wanted. If I tried to increase the magnitude of the vector, it will select other geometries that I do not want.



Below is how it looks:

Magnitude of Vector: 5

Magnitude of Vector: 10

Magnitude of Vector: 15

As you can see in the above picture, the points which I do not want are included in the selection. The points that I want is still not yet selected fully. This method is fully procedural though, but I think that it can't be used in this situation. But is a valuable knowledge which can be applied in further.

By right I want it to look like that:

This is done by draggin the points and doing a group by pattern. But this way isn't procedural though.

Below is how the dust look for the cracking earth open: