Hi Mike, that's a really cool use of ArrayGem!

And yes, although ArrayGem was developed to help with placing gemstones on a surface you can use it to place any kind of object along a curve on a surface as well.

A couple of notes:


> ArrayGem needs a reference circle (maybe other shapes will
> work - need to find out).

No other shapes won't work - it definitely expects to have a circle included in your selection and it uses some pieces of the circle to control the placement - the origin of the circle will be mapped to the point on the surface (so placing your other objects relative to this allows you to control the "sink in" amount like you mentioned), and also the radius of the circle is taken as the item's size - the way spacing in array gem works is that the spacing you enter will be used as the distance between each circle. That's a different style of measurement than ArrayCurve - the spacing for array curve is taken between points and the distance measured as distance traveled along the curve.


> Ehhh.... hmmm... Not what I wanted. Puzzled for only a few seconds, I figured
> it was the physical orientation of the reference ring on the object...

So what happened there is that ArrayGem maps the upward normal of the circle to the positive direction surface normal on the surface. If your target surface is an open surface instead of a solid, it can easily be possible that the positive normal direction on it is not necessarily in the way that you want. Most commands in MoI are not sensitive to that, but ArrayGem is. You can use the Flip command to flip the surface in this case to make the surface's positive normal direction to be the other side.


> Michael: Just another wish suggestion, think nothing of it, if it is too esoteric.
> Another Array option could be made to place a grid or diamond configured
> (offset) grid of objects on a surface, starting from a chosen middle point and
> with the ability not to place objects too close to each other, or to even space
> them out.

Yeah I would like to try something like that in the future - unfortunately making a robust mechanism to do that is really quite difficult, especially something that would try to work on any kind of irregular surface that is not of uniform width throughout it.

With that kind of a thing it's not like you can just solve a simple equation and get the answer, you kind of have to make a mechanism that tries to make judgement calls on how to place things to pack them in well, and trying to give an algorithm judgment is a difficult thing to do.

If you need to do that kind of surface item arrangement, I think there are a couple of Rhino plug-ins that you could get to add on to Rhino to help with that particular task.

- Michael