How to give minimum value to random distances

Hello,
With the great help of Chris, I got the definition almost done.

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/divide-a-set-of-lines-in-...

But, the thing is that many times the spheres are intersecting themselves and I cannot find a way to deal with that.. I tried cull, but I guess I use it wrong... Is there any idea of how to give the random machine a minimum value that is greater than the sphere diameter (3, for example)?

Thanks.

Attachments:

HangingSpheresInstallation.gh, 12 KB
IM022.jpg, 220 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ching on January 30, 2012 at 2:45am

In the domain input of the random module you can set it to "3 to 10" for example. Hope it helps.

Permalink Reply by Hannes Löschke on January 30, 2012 at 4:33am

As far as I understand, Chris's definition doesn't work that way.

I quickly tried to implement an extended random generator, that has an input for minimal distance.

My quick and dirty way was to generate random numbers and check the distance of the new one to all the other ones, skipping those with too little distance.

There is a general issue though, how to detect distance settings that are too strict?

Let's say you want 5 values between 0.0 and 1.0. A min distance of more than 0.25 is obviously nonsense. But although you can find a combination that fullfills a distance requirement of 0.2, the probability decreases and the component takes longer to solve.

Permalink Reply by Ching on January 30, 2012 at 6:04am

I checked the numbers againt the next one of themselves and killed those bigger than 3, I think it is working alright:

Attachments:

HangingSpheresInstallation_ching.gh, 16 KB

Permalink Reply by Nankyo on January 30, 2012 at 8:39pm

Hi man, really elegant solution! Thanks a lot. You rock!

I just modified a bit the last opereation.. the Explode leaves 2 points in the same place, which doubles the quantities, so I just change it to End points, and chose the end points... But the rest really works good. Thanks.

Nankyo.

Permalink Reply by Ching on January 31, 2012 at 9:27am

Oh you're right, thanks for letting me know.

Permalink Reply by Roig on January 30, 2012 at 5:02am

Hi, i think you're looking for a máximum value not a mínimum.
You have to set the domium of the random machine within two values, the min and the Max value.
There is another way, you can dispatch the diameter list those values over a number, i. e. 3, and give it a fixed value.
If you upload your definition i can help you better

Permalink Reply by Roig on January 30, 2012 at 5:07am

sorry, i misunderstud, you want to deal with the distance between spheres¡¡¡ let's see

Permalink Reply by Chris Tietjen on January 30, 2012 at 9:19pm

As far as I can tell this definition will keep the spheres from overlapping. The grouped items in the definition were used for testing and can be deleted. Two components give warnings but I couldn't find the problems. As far as I can see the warnings can be ignored. Apologies for the lack of annotations.

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