Hello! Just taking the first few steps with Houdini today, and decided to ideally learn it, and hopefully create a practical tool at same time. The ultimate goal is a simple tool used to generate clean floating stips based on existing geometry for floating detail/decal use in a game engine. (Traditionally creating a lot of these can be quite a laborious process, so what better use-case for a houdini tool) I wouldn't be surprised if this is something multiple people have figured out already!

I've gotten as far as generating a curve, sweeping it, and ray projecting it back down onto the original geo. The issue I'm running into atm is that the orientation of the sweep geometry is inconsistent, leading to bugs during the projection step. I've rooted around with the various Sweep Rotation options, but to no avail at first glance.

Ideally, I'm thinking the sweep geo should be perpendicular to the projected geometry's edge that the curve was originally generated from. I noticed that in the Sweep SOP > Construction > Up Vectors > Target Up Vector there's an “Attributes” option. Is my reasoning sound in assuming that some clever VEX here could properly align the sweep's geo orientation perpendicularly? The thought process here is that there's some way of reusing the original geometry points' vectors/normals that the curve is generated from to drive the sweep's orientation, but I'm a bit stumped about how to implement that idea.

Additionally, I'm not opposed to throwing this approach out the window if its fundamentally flawed, after all, I don't really have a handle on Houdin's workflow quite yet

Thanks for reading!