Circle packing on the surface

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Daniel Piker on August 19, 2012 at 1:15pm

It's worth defining exactly what you mean by a circle packing.

Is it just that you want no 2 circles to overlap, and to fill the surface without too many large gaps ?

Or is it important that the circles should be tangent to one another ?

Here is a simple example with Kangaroo that uses collision forces between spheres of chosen radii to distribute points across a surface, also giving you the option to fix some centres.

(This is also a nice example of the usefulness of the new 'strictly diagonal' option in the cross-reference data matching component)

see also these threads:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/circle-packingflow-along

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/group/kangaroo/forum/topics/packing-ci...

Attachments:

• circles_on_surface_example.gh, 11 KB

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on August 19, 2012 at 1:26pm

By pure chance, this friday I was teaching how to use Kangaroo and was doing a circle packing exercise. It occured to me on the spot to use cross reference with strictly diagonal instead of the usual way i did it. First time I used the component.

Permalink Reply by Alex on August 20, 2012 at 3:45pm

Thank you very much. Your solution is close to final one. I was forgot to mention in last massage that also must be a possibility to control gap between circles with tolerance of 0.01mm. Usualy is about 0.05mm. Maybe you have some other solution in approach. I can better explain with some pictures what i need to realise in practice.On pictures are 3d surfaces but i work only with 2d surfaces.

Permalink Reply by Paola Oliveras on January 16, 2014 at 10:23pm

Hello Daniel, Im new in Grasshopper, and Im trying to make a circle packing in a 3D surface...

I have 7 sizes of circles (1400, 1200, 950, 750, 600, 500, 400, 200)... Im trying to do something similar as yours, but I can't figure it out where to add more circles and where to manage that they do not overlap, and I need them to be like 60 tall.

hope you can help me with this. 

Thanks, Paola

Attachments:

• CirclePacking_Grasshopper-Kangaroo.gh, 14 KB
• CirclePacking Surface.3dm, 242 KB