Tips for making animal scales

Hello everybody,

I'm working on developing a group of definitions that can produce different patterns inspired by animal skins such as the ones in the following photos. 

https://br.pinterest.com/pin/399131585706477716/

Despite being relatively new to Grasshopper I've achieved some satisfactory results due to the excellent help from other users here.

So far some of the approaches I've tried have used different components such as Populate Geometry or Divide Surface and then Eval Surface to provide points where geometry can be oriented and positioned to. This approach has been nice because I can freely experiment with the shape of the geometry I choose to distribute over the surface. However a con to this is that there is little variation to the pattern since it is always the same geometry being repeated over the surface. Applying some random size scaling to the geometry hides a bit of this uniformity and I've found that to be helpful for adding a layer of diversity. I've also explored a way to reduce the subdivision uniformity of divide surface. Following is a link to one definition that served as a starting point in this direction.

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/snake-scales-distribute-o...

Other methods I tried use Voronoi, FacetDome, GeometryGym's GeoDome, Tessellation and Network Fillet to make cells on the surface. This path makes beautiful organic and/or geometric variation but it has been less fruitful for me because I don't have as much control as I would like and I still don't know how I could better manipulate the shape of the final cell. Specifically, on how round the top surface edge of the cell is.

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/cull-all-items-from-data-...

Some of the definitions I've been able to produce have been useful. Others not so much due to my lack of experience. So I've come to the community for help. My approaches have all been very experimental and based on trying things out as I go. There is little planning in what I've been able to produce so far and my strategy has been one of free roaming while attempting to learn new things and gain experience. Sometimes there are happy surprises, other times I get lost and seem to arrive at a dead end.  Now I'm looking to find out if there are some other good approaches for making these kinds of patterns and applying them to surfaces. 

Thanks!

Leo