Hi there, this is a little walk trough of a setup I´ve build for a visualization project both in XSI and in Houdini using a similar approach and more or less similar tools. Nothing fancy though, but maybe useful. The setup is based on a bend-deformed grid and instantiated geometry on particles.
Sorry to arrive so late to the party… using a wrangle to create the point and transfer the normal, just 5 nodes in total… I hope this helps understand a different approach.
BTW, your circle + add method is nice but this is faster and easier I think.