Hi @bobtato
Have you looked at the dual output of triremesh?
As you noticed - hard spheres will naturally tend to pack in regions of regular hexagonal arrangement, with grain boundaries between them.
For doing it with repulsion (a continuous force field through space like you mention), have a look at
Also - something that I think isn’t always immediately obvious is that equal spacing between neighbours and topological regularity (i.e. a smaller number of pentagons and heptagons) are actually conflicting goals.
As you subdivide an icosahedron you will always have just 12 irregular vertices (12 pentagons in the dual), even when you have hundreds of vertices. For the same number of vertices it is generally possible to form a less topologically regular arrangement with more than 12 pentagons and some heptagons, but with better regularity of distance between nearest neighbours.
If your priority is topological regularity on a freeform surface, what you can do is generate a distribution with a smaller number of points, form the mesh, then subdivide that.