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Here's the scenario so you know where I'm headed:

I have a single, remeshed model of a tree trunk. Everything is connected and merged together. No leaves. The mesh is obviously tapering - being much thicker at the trunk and branching into thinner and thinner geometry, as trees do.

What I want to achieve is simple in theory: I want to scatter a bunch of triangles on this mesh and have the scale of each triangle be based on the relative thickness of the tree at that specific point. Bigger triangles at the trunk, and smaller triangles on the twigs.

How do I achieve this?

I'm thinking that if I could sample the closest face at any given point and then measure the distance from that point to the closest point on the opposite side of the mesh, it would give me a float value I could use to control the scale. And that's as much as I can understand on my own. I don't know how to achieve it, or if it would even work.

Any suggestions would be lovely!

SelvesteHe
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  • Hello and welcome to Blender.SE! How did you create the trunk? Is that a previously modeled mesh, or was that also created with Geometry Nodes? – quellenform May 10 '23 at 18:53
  • Hey, thanks a lot. The trunk was created using curves to mesh, so I technically have that data as well. It would have to be passed from one GN-Modifier to this one, however, as I have a few other modifiers in between. Not entirely sure how to do that. – SelvesteHe May 10 '23 at 19:24
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    Somewhat related : https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/241810/35559 – Robin Betts May 10 '23 at 22:14
  • @RobinBetts That was the solution! Thank you so much! – SelvesteHe May 11 '23 at 08:36

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Solved! Thanks to RobinBetts for providing the clue on how to measure the distance.

Here is what I wanted to achieve: Desired effect

Some of the spheres are smaller than intended, but I only need to control the maximum size for a given area.

Here's the setup for anyone interested:

Node setup

Thanks again!

SelvesteHe
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