Hello and thanks (again) to @raganmd for his numerous tutorials.
I don’t follow them on a very scholar way as I’m more into pulling concepts progressively while discovering TD all along small projects I do (converting some old max projects into TD is very instructiv !)
Instancing. GOOD. With the instance1, 2 and 3 pages etc.
I’d like to know if I can grab back my geometry resulting from instancing.
I mean: I have a sphere. I instanciate MANY of it all for being positionned all along another sphere.
Ok.
So I have a sphere made of spheres.
Is there a way to grab the finaly geometry ? I mean the vertices coordinates of the spheres composing the big sphere ?
Hello Julien,
No, you cannot grab the new geometry because there is no geometry… Instancing is a copy of your original geometry in the graphic card displacing each copy with the coordonate of your CHOP/TOP, as if you use a geometry shader to change or create new vertex.
One solution could be to record a texture in a GLSL pixel shader, recording all the vertex coordonates as points cloud but you lose quite all the informations about normals, UV etc.
You can multiply the object until millions because there is no geometry, “le beurre et l’argent du beurre”…
The question I’d ask here @julien is - “for what?” As in, what is it that you want / need to do with SOPs that you aren’t able to do with instances?
There are lots of possible pipelines for converting your instance data into SOPs (copy SOP, script SOP, replicators, etc) - but each of those methods is likely to be more or less performant depending on what you’re intended use case looks like. Know what you’re trying to accomplish can help us push you in a direction that will be fruitful.
Actually, it was my way of exploring here that probable biased the way I wanted to follow.
And actually not a “real case” in my project, just was exploring further instancing in TD.
Often, not real cases are biased as they are pushing into no way ways.
If I wanted to place spheres at each vertex of a sphere. Ok.
And In the end, I wanted to used the whole set of vertices (each elementary sphere having its own set of vertices) for doing something else. Like a cloud I could disturb, etc.
As I read your answer, I think I can do that following the way of SOPs for copying all my vertices and multiplying them in the sense of making them copied in the space.
Then, I could do the instancing in the end if required, but I guess this wouldn’t be required here.