Is there an easy way to create uniform point distributions on a sphere, such as the endpoints of an icosohedron, but more points?

[DanielPiker]

Hi @jayandrewscadd

@jayandrewscadd

I’d rather perfectly uniform spacing

I’m afraid this is impossible for more than 20 points (the vertices of an icosahedron).

One way to get a nice symmetrical distribution where the variation in distances to neighbours is quite small is to subdivide an icosahedron and project the vertices onto a sphere.

icosa_dots.gh (8.4 KB)

There are many other options though. Distributing points on a sphere is a surprisingly rich topic. Because perfectly regular arrangements are not possible for arbitrary numbers of points, there are many different quantities which can be optimized for, giving different results - 2 well studied ones are maximising minimum distance between any 2 points(the Tammes problem), minimizing the electrostatic potential energy (the Thomson problem).
See this thread for a bit more on the topic

Golf ball? Evenly spaced points on a sphere?

[golf_ball_search] The search feature on this forum often fails to find results where a Google search is more successful, but in this case, it’s not very helpful either (though I didn’t dig too deep): https://www.google.com/search?q=golf+ball+rhino+grasshopper I found this Grasshopper effort by @ckmok (a member of this forum) but the GH is incomplete, not fully parametric and relies on a list of 780 triangular surfaces in a Rhino file that form a sphere to generate 392 dimples. I can’t recom…

For an alternative approach, here’s a nice Fibonacci distribution of points on a sphere:

Points On Sphere

Nice explorations. If you use a stereographic projection, you can do the triangulation in the plane without that seam, and get the same result as from the convex hull [image] sphere_stereographic.gh (9.4 KB)