Populate Geomet(ries) - populates across multiple geometries

[Jonathan19 (Jonathan)]

Hello,

I have one boundrary curve and a bunch of circles that touch and overlap it.

Now I want to populate each of these trimmed circles with X amount of points.

I can easily do this with one and have succeful results - points within boundrary, nice and tidy.

However, when I try to connect all of the boundary surfaces, every X amount of points are populated within the entire, combined geometry of all of the circles.

Why does populate geometry do this? Can I prevent it in some way? I suspect that I have too little understanding of the lists and how they are iterated or that the “trimmed” surfaces retain some data that messes with the function.

Desired result for all of the circles:

Yielded result when connecting all the circles and not just one:

pop_geo_mwe.3dm (108.4 KB)

pop_geo_mwe.gh (19.2 KB)

Windows version:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Version 10.0.26100 Build 26100

Rhino version:
Rhino 8 SR25 2025-11-10 (Rhino 8, 8.25.25314.11001)

Sincerely yours,
Jonathan

[inno]

here you are populating each of the 28 different surfaces with 78 random points:

the result is indeed 28 different lists of point (in branches 0 to 27), each containing the desired 78 points

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if you use List Item, it will show you the i-th element of each of the 28 lists

in your case it’s showing you the first element of each of the 28 lists:

if you want to select all the 78 points that populate -for instance- the first Branch of your data tree (which corresponds to the first Surface you have populated) you should use Tree Branch component:

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this collection of videos on data trees will be your best friends

The deal with Data Trees

[Jonathan19 (Jonathan)]

Thank you for your comprehensive answer @inno it made me go in the right direction and also realize that my question and submitted mwe was maybe cut a bit short.

It made me understand how "point in curve” iterated through every point’s index rather than the submitted branch - and how I could break the tree up and feed the “point in curve” with full branches rather than indicies (I’m still on very thin ice here, hehe).

If you for whatever reason want to look at what I was working with and how it turned out, here is the file that accomplished what I originally wanted to do:

territory_poi_datavisualization_mwe.gh (20.8 KB)

territory_poi_mwe.3dm (77.4 KB)

All the best,
Jonathan

[inno]

a couple of comments if you like, these curves in A are exactly the same curves in B (here compared by their Length):

this means you can just delete all the components on top and just connect A instead

another thing, minor but relevant, here you are populating 28 surfaces with 78 random points each:

consider that Random is GH is -luckily- a bit driven against real randomness, meaning that -for instance in Populate Geometry- points are not randomly scattered here and there as if you were dropping salt on a steak

but their randomness is driven in such a way they are sort-of randomly yet evenly distributed on your surface, so there won’t be clusters of points looking significantly closer than others

this random-spreading is itself driven by an integer number, and you can specify it (if you want) in order to get different point organization

you can specify that with the Seed, input s :

not specifying any seed means you are using number 1 for all of them, which in this case might look just fine, but I’d suggest to also try different seeds, even one different seed for each of your Surfaces to be filled, like:

this generates an integer between 0 and 12345678 for each of your surfaces, and uses that integer to generate a unique point distribution on that surface

because you have 20 surfaces, so you are picking 20 random numbers between 0 and 12345678, it’s reasonable enough to assume hope no two of those numbers will be the same number so each of your surface will be populated in its unique way

this said, your surfaces are all different, so even using the same seed for each of them might yield a result which is “different enough” for you to be happy anyway… but better to always stay on the safe side and explore other possibilities

territory_poi_datavisualization_mwe_Re.gh (25.7 KB)