how to populate a random shape

Hi everyone,

Im an new at grasshopper so a lot of doubts on how to do some things. Maybe someone can help on how to do the following:

I would like to populate a specific shape with another ( in this case pentagons ) and make them randomly distribute in the shape, in different sizes without intersecting.

As I said Im quite new at grasshopper and therefore a little bit stuck on how to proceed. can someone help me?

thank you very much in advance,

Best regards,

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 7, 2016 at 1:34am

[...] without intersecting.

That's the hard part. You can approach this in three ways:

Create a distribution of points, figure out the nearest neighbour for each point, then use that distance to scale each inserted object to guarantee a no-intersection.
Create a lot of shapes, then start removing the ones that intersect.
Create a lot of shapes, then start moving them (maybe also scaling them?) until they no longer intersect.

(1) can be done using standard Grasshopper components, (2) may be, I'm not quite sure and (3) will probably require the Kangaroo plugin.

The attached file uses Proximity3D to figure out the distance for each point to the nearest neighbour point, then uses half that distance to scale each polygon. Rotation is randomized.

Attachments: