Hi houdiniks.
As an excersise I am trying to create a ray SOP but in VEX.
I manage to get all the ray intersecting stuff done.
But now I am trying to mimic the closest point mode from the ray SOP.
At the moment I made a try with brute force, basically I loop every point from the destination geometry and compare the distance against my current point, finally I get the point closer to the current point.
Theorically this should work, but I get weird results. Maybe cos VEX is executed in SIMD and then the variable storing the minimum distance is writted by several sampled points at a time?
Not sure, somebody have tried this before?
I have attached a file with the VOP SOP I am using.
thx

In theory that should work, but will be painfully slow except in very simple cases.
You should look at doing this will a point cloud as that can automatically return the closest point. Of course the ray sop will actually return the closest point on a poly but once you have the closest point you could loop through the connected points and find the actually closest point on the surface.

Simon
In theory that should work, but will be painfully slow except in very simple cases.
You should look at doing this will a point cloud as that can automatically return the closest point. Of course the ray sop will actually return the closest point on a poly but once you have the closest point you could loop through the connected points and find the actually closest point on the surface.

Yes I have though about using a point cloud.
Can I use a regular .bgeo file as a point cloud?
Or I have to save the geometry with the .pc extension?
Still, only for curiosity, if anybody can tell me why the VOP SOP I made is not working correctly will be great.
cheers

You can point straight to a bgeo, or use the op: syntax to point straight to a sop

Simon
You can point straight to a bgeo, or use the op: syntax to point staright to a sop

Thanks Simon it worked really well.
Are amazing th things you can do with point clouds.