Randomize Placement and Orientation

I found a rendering online that I decided to duplicate. I succeeded but now I want to take it a step further. I have included the final rendering and the rhino file. What I want to do is set up a grasshopper to both randomly orient and position the balls across a given plane. I want them to all remain at the same level on the Z-axis. I manually did all of that for this example, but I want to do a field of them (or similar object) and I don’t want to sit their tweaking individual objects. I tried to play around with it a bit, but after a few tries I couldn’t keep the separate layers of the balls to stay together while randomizing their location. I need them to be in separate layers because I have V-Ray using the layers to apply the different materials. I would have included a definition, but since mine failed spectacularly, I’m hoping someone can help me.

Attachments:

Balls-final.jpg, 985 KB
Balls.3dm, 1.4 MB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Boris Rüther on April 7, 2011 at 9:15am

hi narthan,

i think this definition will help you. you just need to set the parts of the two materials of one ball and one reference plane.

i hope you will understand the tangled wires :D

boris

Attachments:

Balls_110407.3dm, 227 KB
randomballs_110407.ghx, 496 KB

Permalink Reply by NathanR on April 7, 2011 at 11:33am

Thank you Boris,

Is there any chance you could upload a screen shot of your script as well? The computers available to me at school are still using version 0.8.0004 and it seems like I might have lost at least a couple connections. Thank you.

Permalink Reply by NathanR on April 7, 2011 at 12:38pm

I took a look at what Boris did as a guide and I made my own version that at least moves them into random places, but so far can't figure out how to have each randomly change orientation. I'm tempted to use a list function, but I'm not sure that would do it.

Attachments: