Circle packing with bridges/tabs

Grasshopper
1

I’m trying to do something like below but with 3D circle packing.

cp tab2

Connecting center points would be pointless (ha!) of course, I need to connect edge to edge. On a small scale I could do this with Curve Proximity between two circles, navigating connections on all circles has me stumped however.

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Here I’ve collected all Curve Proximity relationships

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I tried connecting every variation with a line (39,2625 lines) and culling by length but not only is that extremely taxing on my laptop, it leaves me with lines between points on the same curve as well. I’m sure I could figure out how to further cull those out but this does not seem to be the way. This is a sample of circles, I need to transfer this script to another with many hundred circles.

image

I’d love some pointers if anyone has some, attached is the gh with just the base circles and collected points.

circle packing bridges.gh (6.7 KB)

2

Try searching the forum, there are many threads on the subject:

https://discourse.mcneel.com/search?q=circle%20packing

1 Like
3

Here’s one simple way - get adjacent circles by proximity of centres, then find connections only between these curves.

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image817×399 92.2 KB

circle packing bridges.gh (15.1 KB)

2 Likes
4

I have searched, in fact some of those threads were made by me asking novice questions. You and Daniel were especially helpful a couple years ago. My question here isn’t about circle packing, but connecting the circles for fabrication.

I’m not replicating this exactly, I want to create overlapping folds between circles using a flexible plastic, but I still need those points/connections.

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image879×813 99.9 KB

5

Thanks, that obvious solution alluded me.

6

At a glance, it looks remarkably similar to this thread last September:

2 Likes
7

Thanks Joseph, I wasn’t hitting the right keywords to pop that up. Very interesting.