How to get normal of a node?

[Chalxsion]

• A* version: 5.4.4
• Unity version: 6000.2.6f2 (4a4dcaec6541)

Pretty much the whole question. I have an RVO controller and I can get the node of the graph that its on, but unclear on how to get the normal info from the node.

[tealtxgr]

Nodes themselves do not have a normal. You would have to sorta create your own way of getting that information. It’s come up in a handful of threads, so you can hopefully find some inspiration here:

@aron_granberg

The nodes themselves don’t really have a normal. So this is not exposed anywhere. The graph visualization will instead position the y coordinate of tile corners at the average of all y coordinates of the nodes that touch that corner.

The relevant code is in the GridGraph.CreateNavmeshSurfaceVisualization method.

@aron_granberg

There is the MovementPlaneFromGraphSystem.SampleSmoothNavmeshNormal method that you can use, though it’s not really written for ease of use. It’s mostly for internal use.
It handles a lot of edge cases pretty well, though.

@aron_granberg

Hi

The normal is not explicitly stored for any node, however if you have a navmesh/recast graph you can calculate the normal like this:

TriangleMeshNode triNode = node as TriangleMeshNode;
var normal = Vector3.Cross((Vector3)(triNode.GetVertex(1) - triNode.GetVertex(0)), (Vector3)(triNode.GetVertex(2) - triNode.GetVertex(0)));

You may also be interested in some methods on the TriangleMeshNode class, such as ClosestPointOnNode, ClosestPointOnNodeXZ and ContainsPoint.

[Laurence_Bopimebic]

very interesting, thanks