msiegrist

You can render normals for objects using the Show Normal [sidefx.com] material. It colors the surface of an object based on the normals of the polygons. So simply attach the material to objects, set up a camera for the angle you want, and render using that camera to create the normal map image.

Note that you will need to be sure that you don't have anything in the shot that doesn't have the Show Normal material applied. This includes the background; by default, the background color is black, which won't work on a normal map. You can also get around this by changing the background color to pure blue (i.e. red=0, green=0, blue=255), which is the color of a flat surface pointed directly at the camera.

I'm attempting to write a script in Python that accesses the bones associated with a mesh. I thought to do this by looking at the ‘pCaptPath’ as described in this thread [sidefx.com], however that attribute no longer seems to be generated by capture SOPs.

Is there an alternate way to access it? A new way to find the same information perhaps?

I did look at the ‘pCaptSkelRoot’, but it only has a single string representing the root of the skeleton. I'd prefer not to have to write code to search through the whole hierarchy looking for bones if I can avoid it.

Any suggestions? Thanks!