Hello SideFX,
Today I did some tests concerning vertex normals
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=48184#48184 [
sidefx.com]
and now I assume that it's not as hard to force Houdini/Mantra to use vertex normals whenever they exist.
Am I right in my imagination how Mantra works?
1. Check the point normals. If we have them we just use them.
2. If we don't have point normals Mantra calculates normals automatically and result is in N global variable.
3. Even if we have vertex type N attribute Mantra doesn't “see” it and tries to find point normals or calculates normals if point normals doesn't exist.
So we need just a “little” changes in this algorithm:
1. Check vertex type N, use it if exists or go to 2
2. Check point type N, use it if exists or go to 3
3. Calculate N automatically.
Same changes need to be done for rendering of viewport.
Same changes could be done for SOPs (say Cusp SOP or Facet SOP could have a flag “Do we want to create a separated geometry (point N) or rock solid geometry with hard edges (vertex N)”), POPs, DOPs…
I understand that fact that these changes can be “minor” only for the first look and in reality it can be harder to implement. But at least no need to change existing data structure to get this.
This is just my understanding of problem