Stephan Moenninghoff

Impossible to say without seeing your network!

Totally. I'll get in touch in May (too busy before that.. 🙄). Will you be at the Design Summit?

Dude. I was just going crazy. Thanks for that!

Gotcha. Try this. Does this work? Repeat Sym.vwx

Sorry I don't understand. Do you want the last symbol placed only when you enter 50' and not for any other length?

You need to add one here. I think that does it. I haven't tested it much but it worked with your suppplied file.

Sure. Use the move node or feed what comes out of the "Get Point on Poly" (at the p port) into a "get xy" node. perform your additions to the x and y coordinates and feed that back into a point 2 node. That's your new coordinate.

The Symbol node takes a point input. Just replace the locus node with the symbol node and reference your symbol.

@Pat Stanford it may be worth noting that you cannot convert a line to a polygon without adding a third vertex. This is totally logical to old VWX dinosaurs but may not be for newbies. @Aneesh Carvalho other than that, what Pat says. That method will give you the first point on the polygon only so you need to use some more nodes to get the others. Something like this works: Name the polygon (bottom of the Object Info Palette) and use that as a criteria in the "Objs by Crit" node to identify the object that you want the Marionette to act on. Note that the polygon has three vertices, so it looks like a line but is, in fact, a polygon.

Yeah. Unfortunately, there is no node for that but I may file a VE 🙂

That worked. Create a drape surface. U and V iteration = 100. Name it "test2". Run the Marionette. Adjust level of embedding by changing the insertion point of the symbol and the rotation values in the Marionette. Ungroup. Reference a different symbol and repeat. Delete the symbol instances that are outside the icing and those that collide with others. Max. 10 minutes clean-up work. You could try and expand the Marionette to go looking for symbols that are placed too closely to others but it's hardly worth the effort, I don't think. Sprinkle v 2.0.vwx

You guys remember Drape Surface? I never thought I might be needing this some day... ROFL TBC...

Having limited success with a simple NURBS surface but the whole thing fails with a surface derived from the frosting geometry. I have tried to unclip but to no avail.

Just had another look. There may be hope...

FWIW, the way I went about placing the sprinkles via Marionette was to generate curves from the model and getting the points on each curve by subdivision. Each sprinkle-symbol is then placed on one of those points and rotated randomly. That is why they get embedded. If there was a way to generate random points on each surface of the frosting model and getting the normal's orientation at that point, the sprinkles could be placed perpendicular to the surface and then be rotated randomly. Unfortunately I don't know of a way to do that with Marionette.

I tried that. The frosting has overhanging cliffs, depending on the degree of twisting and the depth of the ridges. I don't think the DTM is meant to handle such conditions.

Here's the file. Play with randomization along the generated curves and add more symbols as you require. Some manual nudging may be required to get this to look the part. Sprinkles.vwx

...and again, Marionette comes to the rescue.

It's not too late to register 🙂

The slider should output integers. It's broken (but works). I'll file a bug.

Guys, that's what Marionette is here for. It's not rocket science (otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it). Come to my class at the Design Summit to learn how to do this kind of stuff in no time (shameless plug) :-) Star.mp4 Star.vwx