@i_mazlov Hey Ilia,
I sincerely can't thank you enough for leading me down the right path. Having a tangential plane from the polygon normals mixed in with a direction that depends on polygon vertices order is an approach that never occurred to me. I wish I had asked my question sooner, as I have spent the last 2 weeks exploring many different and more intricate approaches without any success, so you can only imagine how grateful I am for your assistance today.
After implementing your recommended approach, I noticed the following: while the clones (red Pyramid primitive objects as illustrated in the screenshot of my previous message) that are situated on the front-side and left-side facing polygons of my Object are oriented in the desired fashion (i.e. just like the Cloner object with a "Up Vector" set to "None"), the clones situated on the back-side and right-side facing polygons of my Object are oriented in the polar opposite direction of where I would like them to "point" towards (i.e. so the opposite of the desired direction). I presume that this is due to the fact that the normals values were calculated on the Object's local coordinates. For example, a polygon situated at the front of the Object (let's say, the middle chest part of the Object) will have its normals be (0;0.1;-1)
, while a polygon situated on the complete opposite side of the Object (i.e. its middle back) will have its normals value be (0;0.1;1)
.
As you can observe in the screenshot from my previous message, the clones (Pyramid primitives) are all facing upwards on the (for example) right thigh of the Object, whether they are in front, on the back, left or right side of said thigh. Same thing for the arms, where they are all uniformly pointing in either the right or left direction (discarding the wrists or elbows of course).
My question is: with the current approach of having a tangential plane from the polygon normals mixed in with a direction that depends on polygon vertices order, would it be possible to replicate the uniform direction of the clones as illustrated in the screenshot, regardless of the side they are facing on the Object?
I have attempted several things today, such as adjusting the vertex order based on normal direction, introducing a directional bias in world space and, lastly, using world space normals for consistency. All to say, nothing has worked so far. I kept questioning whether I was ever on the right path or if I was over-complicating things when the solution (which escapes me) might be much simpler.
Once again, thank you very, very much for your guidance and assistance. It has already been extremely valuable. I'm very grateful!