Hey all,

This is probably a pretty simple problem; I am creating a tiny planet with roughly 10-20 large buildings stuck to the surface of the planet. I want to be able to grab a building and move it around while it sticks to the surface of the planet as while as maintaining proper orientation away from the surface. Having a control to rotate each building on the other axis is another goal.

Logically it seems simple. I don't know if I need to write an expression to limit the position each building to a specific distance from the planet (which I don't know the math for….I don't know how to translate distance from a point into position…), or if there is a node workflow that would do this…

I've managed to to populate a bunch of ‘buildings’ on random points that were generated using scatter; creating normals, carrying them through to the copy node, ete. This was all inside the sphere object that I created, and I don't know if I should be ‘rigging’ this at the top obj level or inside of an object.

Thanks!

I'd do this at the object level…
have a sphere object
and then a Building object (you can have multiple buildings inside)
you can use a rivet or sticky to place the buildings - both of these tools will allow you to transform the buildings while still ‘sticking’ to the surface…

If your sphere is NURBS geometry, you can get P using the prim VEX function and it would perfectly mapped in U and V.

You can also use polar coordinates. Or just trigonometry like the file below.

The normal is always gonna be away from the center of the sphere.

and don't forget the Creep SOP!