Been iterating hard on the Array tool in Tiger+ and I’d like some outside opinions, because the two decisions I’m least sure about are the ones that change daily use.
Spacing by bounding box, on by default. Centre-to-centre spacing means copies overlap until you happen to dial the slider past the object’s own size. Measuring box-to-box instead makes the number a clear gap, so 0 means exactly touching. I’ve made that the default. Is there a case where centre-to-centre is what you actually reach for first?
Per-axis spacing with a uniform lock. X, Y and Z each get a row, with a Uniform toggle that drives all three from one. Both meanings — spacing and gap — keep their own remembered values, so flipping the checkbox doesn’t lose what you set under the other.
Array onto an object. Pick a target surface, polysurface, mesh or SubD and the copies scatter over its skin, standing on the surface normal. Five distributions: area-weighted blue-noise, mesh vertices, face centres, a UV grid that respects trimmed holes, and seeded random.
The blue-noise one was the interesting problem. Plain area-weighted random is uniform but clumpy, and on a surface the clumps are what your eye catches. It now draws several candidate points per copy and keeps whichever is furthest from anything already placed — about 3.7× the minimum spacing of naive random, for no real cost at these counts.
Curious what people would expect “array on a surface” to do by default — even coverage, or follow the UV grid?
One thing I’ll own publicly because it might save someone else the same afternoon: the panels were 390 px wide, a number picked before anyone measured the rows. Eto on Mac doesn’t clip an overflowing row with an ellipsis — it just doesn’t draw the part past the edge. So Array had quietly lost its Y and Z axis toggles, and a “Pick spacing” button had been rendering as “Pick” for a while. Measuring all 1432 panel rows put the widest at 476 px. If you build Eto panels, measure your rows.
Free, Rhino 8 Win/Mac (Rhino 7 script edition too): Tiger+ | Food4Rhino