Sphere Packing

Hello all,

I am trying to use Kangaroo to do a bit of sphere packing, using different sizes of spheres related to the required program areas. I have seen some examples of 2d circle packing, and I've tried to translate this into 3d spheres, but I can't figure out how to set the desired sizes and prevent overlapping. Any advice?

Thanks,

Bill

Attachments:

131018 Spheres.gh, 33 KB
Sphere Packing 2.3dm, 212 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Marc Syp on October 18, 2013 at 3:57pm

Hi Bill,

I haven't taken a look at your files, but I can give you some guidance based on a system I built a couple years ago for this very purpose.

First you will want to create gravitational forces between the sphere centerpoints. Then you generally want to create a separate force that consists of springs of a very high stiffness between centerpoints, with a length that represents the sum of the spheres' radii. This will prevent collisions, although you will find that relaxing the stiffness will prevent the system from getting stuck in sub-optimal configurations.

You can see a video of the system I built and some discussion on the topic here:

https://vimeo.com/15563685

Marc

Permalink Reply by Vadim Mishchuk on November 2, 2013 at 3:40pm

Hi Marc. Do you possibly have a tutorial on how to create this process? Or even a sample file? I understand how to have two spheres interact without crossing using Kangaroo, that is by defining a rest length. I'm curious as to how you can have multiple spheres of different sizes interact using the SpringFromLine tool without having their surfaces cross.

Permalink Reply by Jesse on February 2, 2014 at 6:32am