<< Your initial image sort of suggested that you were targeting the cylinder, because of the nature of the totally regular flat pattern that you showed.>>

Sorry if that was confusing, but I was trying to say that I wanted the object (on the left) to be filled with evenly spaced holes. I was including the plane to give an example of how the holes should be spaced.

<< ...how about this version here...>>

Yes, that is more like what I am looking for. I'm just trying to figure out the math behind making the holes as equally spaced as possible. In your example, the holes are still unequally spaced in areas near the top of the object.

I have also been playing with using cylinders to create the holes over the past few days, but I haven't totally figured it out yet. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon.

Thanks for all of your help.

A partial attempt, incomplete.
The extrusions need to be longer...
Not sure of the best way to pack circles on a hemisphere...

Anyway, it has been good Moi practice.

Notices that when doing right to left selection highlight, the yellow highlight color often failed to remain yellow...

Is there a way to get the flowed circles to rotate "flat" on the hemisphere? If not pre-rotated, they end up radial. Maybe
there is another way?

< I don't understand why you are using angled cylinders and projecting them on a flat plane.
I don'd project on a flat plan. the Flat Plan is just the grid for start base of cylinders
In fact no need to draw line, the fonction Orient / Line-Line is sufficient for draw cylinder
from the Point snap grid toward Top

Something like this all is reversed after the drawing of cylinders

Hi YHWH_777,

> Yes, that is more like what I am looking for. I'm just trying to figure
> out the math behind making the holes as equally spaced as possible.

The math involved is likely to be extremely complex as there's a lot of constraints and variables involved.

Also there is probably no exact solution that will give the same spacing as there is on the cylinder part, so it's more of an "error minimization" type thing, and the actual things that you would probably want to minimize would be the distance between some circles measured from points on the perimeter of each circle, which is different than just distances between points on the sphere.

So the whole thing taken together trying to specify with a formula is going to be quite difficult.

Such things won't usually be solved by a single formula, it's more likely that an automated process would solve it by an iterative method where the circle for each hole would be adjusted slightly towards its neighbors and then that process repeated many times in order to distribute things.

Without some sophisticated iterative solver mechanism like that you can instead use your judgment for placing the profiles where you think they look good.


> In your example, the holes are still unequally spaced in areas near the top of the object.

Now that you have seen the technique used for that particular construction, you can adjust those steps to your liking, you could change the amount of profiles, or rotate them around individually if you want to try some other kind of spacing.

- Michael

Hi Brian,

> Is there a way to get the flowed circles to rotate "flat" on the hemisphere? If not
> pre-rotated, they end up radial. Maybe there is another way?

In the last step of Flow there are several options that you can adjust and one of them is a checkbox for "Rigid" - when that mode is enabled the objects being flowed will only be moved and rotated into their target position and not actually warped, so that may be the kind of thing that you are asking about here.

- Michael

Thank you Michael.

Here is a reference for "distributing points on a sphere."

http://cgafaq.info/wiki/Evenly_distributed_points_on_sphere

No more time to play today, have to work...
Some of the methods may be scriptable...?

Hi Brian, unfortunately the difficulty actually goes beyond just distributing things only on the sphere itself - the problem is about distributing things on the sphere that are also simultaneously equally distributed from the elements coming from the cylinder part as well...

Maybe that will yield something useful for YHWH_777 anyway though, but it's complex enough that I'm not really going to be able to dig into it more myself.

The "electrostatic repulsion" method described there is basically the same thing as the iterative solver approach which might be an approach if you were writing some custom software to solve this particular problem.

- Michael

Since you cant unroll a doubley curves surface, there wont be any linear way to array the holes. You can come close. Here is a sphere top "Smashed". Rhino tells you it is 30 % smaller though. But you could then put the objects on this and flow them properley (Well, at least close) I think that surface would have to have a bunch of tears in it to properley unroll, then you would have to figure out how to align your objeacts on that wierd shape, to match what you want.