Hello everyone,
I am trying to transition this physical model into a digital format.
My aim is to create a surface using a single component (heart shape) and aggregate it in a way as it is depicted in the picture below. Any ideas how can this be done? At the momment I have my geometry created in rhino but not sure how to aggregate it on a surface.
Any advice or help is more than welcome, thank you 
This is an elastica curve. This GH code shared by Daniel Piker might be helpful:
You can also check out this workshop by Fereshteh Khojastehmehr:
Thank you for claryfing that this is an elastica curve. Thats a start for me to begin searching further more.
Any ideas how this can be applied to a whole surface?
Hi. Perhaps you could use something similar to this process:
For the aggregation of the shape, you can take a look at Wasp
https://www.food4rhino.com/en/resource/wasp-grasshopper-101-tutorial-001-wasp-basics
You define a set of rules in your heart shape and from there you build up.
My first impression is that if you are trying to produce geometry as close as possible to your physical model with grasshopper it’s going to be quite complex. I believe you’ll need a combination of something like Wasp or Anemone in conjunction with Kangaroo.
For starters, clearly defining the rules of how the geometry is being generated is quite important. This will drive the workflow/strategy.
You can probably do everything in 2D and extrude everything at the end. I would start with an L-System, where you get something that looks like a (literal) tree branch. The tricky part will be populating your branches with heart halves in a way that avoids collisions. These could be treated like leaves that are inflated.
Hope this crude sketch explains what I mean. Each ‘leaf’ can start small to assure there are no collisions, and inflated, while being repelled from the branch. This method is going to be hard imo, but will get the most organic result.
Wasp is valid for this task, it would help propagate your shape without collisions. Defining the rules of how each piece can connect will be the hardest part of this method. You may still want to take the Wasp output and run it through Kangaroo to improve the final look.
