Distributing Spheres on a Surface with Offset and Collision Detection

[DanielPiker]

You can look for discussions of both sphere packing and circle packing, since to generate a circle packing on a curved surface, we typically first generate a sphere packing with the sphere centers on the surface, then generate circles at these points in the tangent plane to the surface.

Simple circle packing in grasshopper

Here’s one basic example: uniform_circle_pack_on_trimmed_surf.gh (64.4 KB) [image]

Circle packing on imported surface

Hi @Ersin_S On a closed surface is actually simpler than on an open one, since we don’t need to apply any special behaviour for boundaries. For the target surface we want it as a mesh for the circle packing, so no need to go through the conversion to NURBS [image] circlepack_closedmesh.gh (105.9 KB)

Circle packing on surfaces

Here’s an example with same sized circles, packing on one half, with some kept on the symmetry plane: [image] symmetric_circls.gh (33.7 KB) You do have to set how many will be on the symmetry plane, and it can be a little bit of trial and error to find what works well for the number and radius of circles you have. I also find that to get a better arrangement it helps to move the radius slider up and down a bit, to encourage them to jiggle into a lower energy state. You could also use the Gra…

Golf ball? Evenly spaced points on a sphere?

Here’s a circle packing on a sphere in the current Kangaroo: circles_on_sphere.gh (9.9 KB) [image] It’s still not clear to me exactly what you are after though. Is this literally for a rendering of a golf ball? or you want to actually make a golf ball? or is it a more general question for some other application, and if so what? If the requirement is to have a distribution of points (or dimple centres) on a sphere, all at exactly the same distance from their neighbours, then this is only po…