evFaceTangentPlane() on a degenerate point?

EvanReese

I'm running into an issue creating a plane on a revolved face at the center of the revolve. I'd like to avoid just slightly scooting off the center to something like vector(0.00001, 0). I just need the origin and normal. I understand that it is indeterminate, since the same "location" on the face, could have more than one normal direction, for example at the tip of a cone. In my case, we can assume it's a tangent point, more like the pole of a sphere, which should still only have 1 normal. Does anybody have a way to get a tangent plane at that location, even if it's a bit of a workaround?

Jacob_Corder

@Evan_Reese

your going to have to show in a model what you are talking about. 

Do you want the revolved faces axis? if so just call extractDirection which in this case will call evAxis

if you need the tangent plane at a specific spot on the cone you would need to call evRaycast with the line origin on the axis of the revolved face then
 

var rayResults = evRaycast(context, {
        "entities" : yourFace,
        "ray" : line(somePointOnYourAxis, someDirection),
        "closest" : false,
        "includeIntersectionsBehind":false
});
var tp =evFaceTangentPlane(context, {
        "face" : rayResults[0].entity,
        "parameter" : rayResults[0].parameter
});

if it is going to be a cone, you could also just calculate the point.

if this is not what you are looking for, share the model and ill take a look.

_anton

Least-awkward solution that comes to mind is to either reference the revolve axis entity instead (if it exists) or store an attribute on the revolved geometry.