distributing spheres on a surface without overlapping

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Hi there
I'm creating some animations on how virus's interact with our evolutionary tree and came across this image of a virus. Basically a sphere with a whole load of evenly spaced random sized sphere's stuck on that don't overlap.

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HIV-virus-010.jpg (35.4 KB)

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There are some ideas in here http://forums.odforce.net/topic/19771-tesselating-spheres/ [forums.odforce.net]
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Hi there eetu
thanks for the link , I'm investigating your projects now and trying to adapt your methods to a sphere.
Just from playing a little - your method is to distribute using the voronoi fracture and scatter sops , then measure the area of the polygons and place a circle at the centre of each poly scaled on the area ?

thanks

John
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Yeah, and here's another test with remesh&subdivide, to try and get a bit of that semi-regular stubby look.

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ee_sphere_scatter.jpg (131.1 KB)
ee_spike_sphere_scatter.hip (120.4 KB)

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Eetu that is excellent!
I've had a look at the scene and it's a very elegant idea , using the way the geometry meshes to get a pleasing pattern .

I've been having fun with the voronio noise to get some patterns but am finding the scatter sop a bit limited to create the points based on the noise.

I think it needs a more uniform scatter based on the noise

here's my efforts

John

BTW my hip file uses the csUniformScatter.otl

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JB_spike_sphere_scatter03.1.hip (328.1 KB)
voronio_distr01.JPG (117.3 KB)

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Maybe you can get some ideas from that:

http://julianjohnsonsblog.blogspot.de/2013/07/dart-throw-multiple-size.html [julianjohnsonsblog.blogspot.de]

Its ICE and I don't know if it is in any way transferable to Houdini, but it may be an inspiration.
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thanks for the tip mr bigtree

That looks like just what's needed , it seems the technique is called ‘dart throwing’
searching under those terms I've discovered an old conversation about the same subject were someone's attempted some Vex code to do this

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=96672 [sidefx.com]

and also this discussion

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_mailarchive&Itemid=212&view=WEB&msgid=48DAAF14.9050006@axyzfx.com&perpage=20&revdate=on [sidefx.com]

thanks

John
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