Vertex shader animated polygon flip

Development Rendering
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1

I am trying to create a vertex shader-based animation that would flip each polygon of a (two sided) mesh.
It should look similar to this, except with every polygon of the mesh, rather than just one plane:

245169-flip1.gif

245170-flip2.png
245170-flip2.png1693×850 203 KB

In that example, I use the plane’s pivot and the world X axis for the RotateAboutAxis node. But when it comes to a more complex mesh (a character, for instance), you need the center point of each polygon as the pivot, and a vector perpendicular to that polygon’s normal direction as the rotation axis.
I made several unsucessful attempts, and I am having trouble getting the rotation right.

Could you point me in the right direction? Or maybe you can think of a better approach to this effect?

Thank you.

2

You are on the right path, but you need something, to get pivot of the subject. As an example, you can encode that in your vertex colors or UVs.

3

Yes, that is what I was trying just now.
So far, I have found a node that gives you the tangent and binormal vectors, so I can put that into the rotation axis.

Now I only need to find the center of the polygon/barycentric coordinates to use them as the rotation pivot.

Vertex colors could work for static meshes, but I would rather do it in the material, so that the effect would work on animated meshes, too. Except I have no idea how to find the barycenter of each triangle/polygon, since I don’t have access to the 3 vertices of each triangle, but just the one vertex being processed at the time.

Any ideas?

Also, here’s another gif. I got it working on spheres and sphere-like meshes with hardened/flat normals, since you can fake the polygon pivot doing “objectPivot + (vertexNormal * objectRadius)”.

First row is rotating in their V/binormal axis, second row in the U/tangent axis, and the third in the W/normal one:

245213-flip3.gif