Collisions and spacing

kms5171986

Hello,

First off this plug-in is incredible! Very powerful and well developed. I am writing to ask to learn a bit more about collisions with respect to distributing in this case blocks that represent plants for a planting layout.

What I am struggling with is being able to create "circle packing" for variable distances between entity. Basically I have planting symbols that are circle that represent the desired spacing for a plant. I would like to use the procedural clustering to create a patchwork distribution (see figure 1 for what I would like to have happen)

Generally creating a distribution with the procedural clustering works perfectly for my intent with even spacing so long as the spacing matches the plant block diameter (see figure 2).

what I'm wondering is if there is a way to have the spacing be dynamic to each entity so the result does not have any overlaps (see figure 3)

thanks
-Kevin

D-W

Hi @kms5171986! Thanks for your kind words!

First things first so just to be clear that RN does not provide a way of dynamic distance grid generation, those things are solved exactly using collisions. I don't know if I'm following properly your needs but in this case, I would set the minimal needed distance for eg. 15cm between small plants, and the whole grid would be based on this but when you will turn on collisions it should do the work for you to pack as many as it is possible to not collide. Collisions are based on bounding spheres created automatically based on initial model size and later modified by a few params which in your case may be super handy. If you'll check https://help.rhinonature.com/manual/entities#entity-properties you'll see that each entity has its own multiplier called Local Size which is evaluated per Entity during distribution calculation at the collision checking stage.

I hope I understood your question well and I'd like to say that I'm very happy to see such explorations with RN!
If not 😅 Well... Let me know and I'll try to find an appropriate solution 😉

kms5171986

Awesome, thanks for taking the time to respond. I'll keep working with the collision and local size parameters!