Why not the normal from the DPoF?

Question

Starting from about 4:30 on we build a system to capture the face normal attribute to suzanne the proper rotation. The Distribute Points on Faces node does have a normal output and it does the same thing in this case and would save the extra nodes. Question is are there any drawbacks for a simple setup like this in just using the normal output of the DPoF node? I'm assuming there are more complex cases, where capturing the attribute would be needed and realize it gives more options (vertices, edges etc.).

Answer 1 · 2026-08-28T06:36:19Z

Martin Bergwerf replied August 28, 2026 6:36am

HI Sascha,

That's a great question! (I'm trying to simulate an LLM, simulating a human, here.)

The big difference is, that the Normal of the Distribute Points on Faces outputs the Normal of each Point, whereas the Normal, Captured from the Geometry, in the case of the Cube only has 6 Normals (one for each Face). And that happens to be significantly faster.

There may be situations, where using the Normal of the DPoF Node would be preferred, but I can't think of any.

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Answer 2 · 2026-08-28T15:44:22Z

replied August 28, 2026 3:44pm

Got ya. Thank you, MartinGPT. 😁

👍

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