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.