How to get the normal vector to a point on a curved surface

Hi. I am trying to figure out a way to get the normal vector to a curved surface on a specific point on that surface. Ultimately, I want to find the components of the electric field normal and tangent to the surface. I figure that a good starting point for this would be getting the direction normal to the surface. Thanks.

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James Derrick

Hi @HFrancisco can you elaborate on your question a bit more? If you've already tried any code do share it and also please share where you've already looked in the docs if you haven't found what you're looking for there.

HFrancisco

Hi @James Derrick, thanks for the interest. I'm going for something like getting the FacePrimitive.normal but instead of face normals, I want to get the normals for specific points on a surface in a drawing. For example, in the figure below, there's a red point on the surface of the cylinder sandwiched in between disks. I want to get the direction the orange arrow is pointing to, which is the direction normal to the cylinder surface at the orange point. I want to be able to do this for any surface point in the drawing.

I thought about creating a non-model plane using the point of interest and its nearest neighboring surface points, and then finding the normal to this plane (in which case FacePrimitive.normal should give me exactly what I want if I use the face of the created plane). However, creating planes with Modeler3D.create_plane already needs me to designate the direction normal to the plane I am creating, which is exactly what I am trying to find.