Im searching for an efficient way to model a fungi colony like in this picture



Any advice on how to shape the overall distribution of the spheres (while avoiding intersection)
and how to create the thin lines along which the spheres are located?

Thanks in advance
Achim

You might try using a particle system, that gets attracted towards the sphere. Include some avoidance so that the particles don't intersect.
Follow this up with a trail sop to create the fibrous parts. ( You'll need to birth all your particles at once in order to use the trail sop)
Then copy stamp some spheres onto your trailed lines. Perhaps a resample in order to keep them a uniform distance apart along the fibres.

Just some thoughts, I can think of other more controlled ways that take longer, but it a case of experimenting a bit I think.

Si

Thank you Simon ,

I will try that approach, but as you said, its not very controllable, so it would be great if you could write
about your other, more controllabe ideas.

In the moment I am using a polycage which groups points out of a point cloud (box sop with division turned on)
and some noise. This works quite well, but in this case I dont know how to create the fibrous parts :?: .

Well, another way I was thinking of would be to create a surface first. Create a mesh grid and sculpt it into position so that it forms the top layer of fungi. Then creep some random lines onto it. To create the random lines I would first make a 2 row poly grid then sort the points randomly skin the result back together as columns then resample the lines to create extra points. Again I would try to create the lines first and then attach spheres to the lines rather than going the other way around.

You could extend this method by making some dummy geometry out of simple spheres and then raying the grid onto them. You could then perhaps randomly remove some of the dummy spheres and ray on again,
repeat the process until you have the density of lines you need.

As an alternative to raying, you could look at the inflate sop or even the softbody sop and drop the grid onto your dummy geometry.

Hope this gives you some more ideas.

Si

Thank you again, Simon

this works much better than creating the spheres first and after that the fibrous parts. Unfortunatly I still have a little problem.
I created the random lines by applying some noise to a Nurbs (row & columns) grid. This really worked well, but after raying them I want to delete some parts of them, but as each “stripe” only consists of 1 primitive, I cant. When I resample the lines I get more points, but its still only 1 primitive. Is there a way to split the primitive a each point, so that I can blast away some parts of the line?

you can try the “dissolve-SOP”, select the desired points and the sop will delete the points and you get a lot of different single primitives