I want to scatter needles on conifer trees and it works fine except that the needles are pointing straight out of the branch.
What I need is to get the needles to 'lean' towards the tip of the branch.
I have tried a lot of things and using distance_to_uv is not awful on simple test but not even close on real geometry. The problem is that when I use gradient to map the output of that node, it seems totally random where the result looks best and it also seems to vary on different parts.
Please see the attached simple Clarisse project, alembic and Houdini hip (in case you want to play with it)

As you can see, the 'needles' are setting quite nicely except on 'trunk' so there is something wrong and as said, in real geometry (20000+ branches to scatter the needles) it is totally wrong.
In fact, I would prefer some kind of Alembic property (Houdini attribute) that I could calculate in Houdini to drive the rotation but the problem is that I don't understand how distance_to_uv actually works so I cannot try to mimic it

Thank you very much for any ideas!
This is the simple version that is not too bad but not perfect
Antti